News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures 9780190913540, 0190913541

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News on the Right

 

 

News on the Right Studying Conservative News Cultures

E D I T E D   B Y A N T H O N Y N A D L E R A N D A . J.   B A U E R

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–​0–​19–​091353–​3  (pbk.) ISBN 978–​0–​19–​091354–​0  (hbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

 

CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables  vii Acknowledgments  ix

1. Taking Conservative News Seriously  1 A . J. B au e r a n d A n t h o n y   N a d l e r

2. “From a Christian Perspective”: News/​Talk in Evangelical Mass Media  17 M a r k Wa r d   S r .

3. Containing “Country Music Marxism”: How Fox News Conservatized John Rich’s “Shuttin’ Detroit Down”  47 Reece Peck

4. Weaponizing Victimhood: Discourses of Oppression and the Maintenance of Supremacy on the Right  64 Lee Bebout

5. NRA Media and Second Amendment Identity Politics  84 D aw n R .   G i l p i n

6. Making Media Safe for Corporate Power: Market Libertarian Discourse in the 1940s and Beyond  106 Victor Pickard

7. Conservative News and Movement Infrastructure  123 Alex DiBranco

8. The British Right-​Wing Mainstream and the European Referendum  141 Angela Phillips

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vi C o n t e n t s

9. Cultivating Distrust of the Mainstream Media: Propagandists for a Liberal Machine and the American Establishment  157 Julie B. Lane

10. National Review and the Changing Narrative of Civil Rights Memory: 1968–​2016   174 Robert Greene II

11. Slanting the News: Media Bias and Its Effects  190 Anthony DiMaggio

12. Bridging the Marginal and the Mainstream: Methodological Considerations for Conservative News as a Subfield  213 Mark Major

13. Conservative News Studies: Mapping an Unrealized Field  232 A n t h o n y N a d l e r a n d A . J.   B au e r

Contributors  251 Index  255

 

F I G U R E S A N D   TA B L E S

Figures 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 11.8 11.9 12.1 12.2

Media Consumption by Ideology  197 Echo Chambers? Predictors of Cable News Consumption  197 Predictors of Attitudes Toward Various News Outlets  198 Perceptions of Media Bias in Presidential Elections (December 2007)  199 The Right-​Wing Echo Chamber: Media Consumption and Political Attitudes  200 Predictors of Conservative Political Opinions  202 Predictors of Obama Job Approval  203 Echo Chambers? The 2016 Presidential Election  205 Media Consumption and 2016 Voter Preferences  205 Human Events’ Use of the Term “Liberal Media/​Press,” 1950–​1989  220 New York Times’ Use of the Term “Liberal Media,” 1930s–​1990s  226

Tables

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6

Promotional Statements for Christian Radio News Services  25 Opening Bumpers of American Family Radio Talk Shows  26 Stories Reported on Selected Newscasts for January 8, 2018  30 Excerpts from American Family News Stories for January 8, 2018  33 Talk Shows Aired January 8, 2018, on Evangelical Radio  35 Talk Shows Aired January 8, 2018, on Salem Conservative News/​Talk Radio  39 vii

 

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5.1 5.2 11.1

Figur e s and Table s

Sources of NRA Front-​Page Headlines, mid-​June 2017 to February 28, 2018  91 Dimensions of Second Amendment Discourse  101 Power of Partisan Media Consumption in Predicting Public Opinion  201

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project began with a chance conversation at the Joint Journalism Communication History Conference, held at New  York University in March 2016. Tony was beginning a new project on right-​wing populism; A.J. was finishing a dissertation on the history of conservative media criticism. Both lamented the relative lack of concerted scholarly focus on the study of right-​wing media, and began collaborating to build community. Our efforts gained a new sense of urgency following the surprising election of Donald J. Trump to the U.S. presidency, and this book is one result. Special thanks are due to the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College, which employed both of us during the 2017–​2018 school year when we drafted and edited much of this volume. We were both supported and sustained by the collegiality of Lynne Edwards, Jennifer Fleeger, Sheryl Goodman, Alice Leppert, Louise Woodstock, Colleen Grzywacz, and by countless students, staff, and other faculty colleagues. We are also thankful for several interlocutors who encouraged us and shaped our thinking while producing this volume: Sierra Bell, Shelley Cobb, Brian Creech, Robert Dawley, Brian Dolber, Joan Donovan, Christina Ceisel, Matt Crain, Letrell Crittenden, Julin Everett, Neil Ewen, Des Freedman, Hannah Hamad, Leslie Lars Hunter, Annie Karreth, Johannes Karreth, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Magda Koniecza, William Lawson, Jonathan Marks, David Mindich, Susan McGregor, Lee McGuigan, Brice Nixon, Andy Opel, Devon Powers, Jen Schneider, Doron Taussig, Susanna Throop, Joe Tompkins, Andrea Wenzel, Julie Wilson, and Asta Zelenkauskaite. Tony dedicates his work on this volume to his late father, Richard Nadler. Tony’s thinking about the many topics swirling around this project have been profoundly influenced by myriad conversations beyond what surfaces in citations. Mary Vavrus and Kathy Roberts Forde have been outstanding mentors who have offered intellectual guidance and inspiration for well over a decade now. Tony would like thank family and friends outside academia who have ix

 

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shared such wide-​ranging perspectives on and enthusiasm for talking about partisan news who include Andy Anderson, Rebecca Blakely, Scott Blakely, Marty Foix, Brandon Irvine, Marc Levine, Bill Lindeke, Sarah H. Luizzi, Eliah Lux, Jesse McClelland, Matt Meyer, Tami Morse, Kathy Nadler, Margie Nadler, Nick Perlman, Pat Shink, Scott Schway, Andy Wilson, and Dina Zhang. While this book doesn’t address specific findings from his interviews, Tony would also like to thank the many conservative news consumers and conservative media workers who have generously volunteered to share their thoughts and stories with him through interviews. These perspectives have offered deep insight even beyond specific research findings. Tony would like to give a special recognition of gratitude to Alice Leppert who read so many drafts, indulged in so many dinner conversations, and provided rich feedback and spirited encouragement throughout this project. Tabitha Lepler offered a burst of joy at the end of the project; she even allowed Tony to get decent sleep on most days! A.J. dedicates his work on this volume to his late mother, Mary Ann Baker. She first introduced him to conservative news, as an avid Dittohead in the early 1990s, and this book’s production coincided with her declining health. She was adamant, in her final weeks, that he spent less time with her and more time on meeting book production deadlines. He refused, but knows she would find solace that this book was nevertheless completed. He would like to thank his family—​especially Bruce Baker, Emily and Mackenzie Sanders, Terry and Caroline Bauer, Karen and Mike McCoy—​for their patience and understanding as he balanced his personal and professional obligations during such trying years. He is equally thankful for the support of many dear friends and comrades, especially Steven Thrasher, Tej Nagaraja, and Sam Markwell. He is grateful to the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU—​especially Rodney Benson, Brett Gary, Erica Robles-​Anderson, Marita Sturken, Aurora Wallace, and Angela Wu—​for the opportunity to return to New York, and for the warm welcome back. His contributions to this book benefitted from the guidance of and intellectual engagement with Cristina Beltrán, Andrew Ross, Brian Ray, and Louie Dean Valencia-​García, among many others. Finally, A.J. is forever grateful to Maria Arettines, whose loving encouragement is a resilient source of strength that bolsters this and all of his work. Lastly, we wish to extend our sincere thanks to Hallie Stebbins, David McBride, Holly Mitchell, and Alphonsa James, and to our anonymous reviewers for shepherding this book through the production process. And of course, this book could not exist without our contributors. We are very grateful for all their diligent and careful research, their sharp analysis, and their persistence and patience throughout many rounds of reviews and revisions. All the contributors in this volume graciously served as reviewers for each other and offered comments that thickened the linkages and conversation throughout these chapters.

 

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Taking Conservative News Seriously A . J. Bauer and Anthony Nadler

In February 1962, CBS News broadcast a special report on right-​wing extremism in the United States—​among the earliest televisual exposés of certain key figures of the modern conservative movement. Thunder on the Right began with footage of members of a Minutemen militia unit who, correspondent Eric Sevareid derisively noted, were “prowling for communists on the banks of a Midwest river.” The hour-​long documentary featured footage from meetings of the Christian Anti-​Communist Crusade and John Birch Society, as well as interviews with controversial but influential right-​wing luminaries like Fred Schwartz, Billy James Hargis, H.  L. Hunt, and Birch Society founder Robert Welch. Distinguishing these “extremists” from “more responsible” conservatives like Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, Sevareid warned that the “vibrant vibrations” produced by the “flapping of the right-​wing” risked destabilizing US political culture at best and inciting violence at worst. Thunder, he warned, might “create lightning.” Thunder on the Right epitomizes the tone and tenor of a good deal of journalistic and scholarly criticism of the modern conservative movement in general, and right-​wing media in particular (e.g., Crawford 1980). Airing the same month that William F. Buckley’s National Review published its denunciation of Welch, the broadcast helped popularize the notion that the conservative movement could be divided between a “radical” fringe and a “responsible” mainstream. Associating the radical Right with “thunder,” it initiated an ongoing tendency among critics to rely on metaphors of commotion and clamor while describing the impacts of right-​wing media and media activism. In their highly influential study Manufacturing Consent, for example, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988) accused conservative watchdog group Accuracy in Media of generating “flak,” disciplining the news media when it grew too critical of capitalism or US imperialism. David Brock (2004), an ex-​conservative and founder of the progressive watchdog Media Matters for America, has been raising awareness of what he calls the Republican “noise machine” for the better part of two 1

 

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decades. Meanwhile, political communication scholars Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella (2008) have identified a conservative “echo chamber,” in which conservative media outlets like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the Wall Street Journal combine to set the news agenda for their conservative consumers while inoculating them against ideology-​contradicting facts and arguments. Such metaphors—​thunder, flak, noise machines, echo chambers—​invite us to associate political communication on the right with cacophony. News on the Right begins from a different premise. We contend that a fuller understanding of right-​wing media, and its political cultural byproducts, can be achieved by treating these phenomena as less disorienting than meaning making and deeply interwoven into many conservatives’ daily lives and political sensibilities. Indeed, since just about the dawn of mass communication, right-​wing media producers have seamlessly blended reporting with commentary, narrating the news of the day from a perspective informed by their ideological commitments, as well as more circumstantial partisan reactions.

Conservative News Is Not New While partisan news cultures, including those associated with right-​wing political parties and ideologies, can be traced back at least to the late eighteenth century (Pasley 2003), and indeed across the globe, this book aims to shed light on the interrelated news cultures associated with the modern conservative movement. These modern conservative news cultures are differentiated from other news cultures in part due to their particular antagonistic relation to news produced according to professional journalistic standards and values. While several components of modern journalistic objectivity were developed during the partisan press era (Mindich 1998), they were consolidated as journalistic professionalism in the early twentieth century (Schudson 2001; Schudson and Anderson 2009), not long before free market ideologues began organizing a nascent conservative movement against the New Deal (Phillips-​Fein 2009). That professionalism evolved into a “high modern” journalistic ideology that achieved true hegemony in the postwar decades (Hallin 1994; Pickard 2014)—​a period coinciding with the growth of the modern conservative movement and the construction of its early mediasphere. While Father Charles Coughlin perhaps looms largest in the collective memory of early right-​wing media, he was but one of dozens of radio commentators who opposed the New Deal and contested the popular front in the 1930s and 1940s. Network-​syndicated broadcasters like Gabriel Heatter, H. V. Kaltenborn, Henry J.  Taylor, Fulton Lewis Jr., and George Sokolsky—​each with backgrounds as newspaper reporters or columnists—​filled the national airwaves

 



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with right-​spun news. The same era saw a broad array of reformers and critics charging that monopolistic conditions in the newspaper industry were yielding conservative press bias, oft personified in the figures of syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler and Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick. In addition to mainstream newspapers, pro-​business and anti-​communist interpretations of the news flowed freely from small journals of opinion like Human Events (1944–​present) and Plain Talk (1946–​1950) to more widely circulated periodicals like American Mercury (1924–​1980) to the largest mass-​market weekly of them all, Reader’s Digest (1922–​present). Early progressive media critics, from George Seldes to Dorothy Parker’s Voice of Freedom Committee, exhaustively documented and contested this burgeoning right-​wing mediasphere in the 1940s, sparking some of the most robust media reform efforts in US history to date (see Pickard 2014). In spite of efforts to counter it, right-​wing media blossomed in the early 1950s—​fueled initially by McCarthyism and by the vast wealth of oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, whose Facts Forum (1952–​1956) radio, television, and print products launched or boosted the careers of some of the most prominent conservative journalists and media personalities of the 1960s and 1970s (Bauer 2017). With his launch of National Review in 1955, aided over the airwaves by Clarence Manion and in book publishing by Henry Regnery (Hemmer 2016), Buckley laid the cornerstone of what would become, ironically, a sort of early “establishment” conservative media (see Lane, this volume, for a discussion of anti-​establishment themes in the early years of the National Review). While the National Review often framed itself as the center of the conservative universe, considerable right-​wing media production exceeded its orbit. Despite being formally exiled by Buckley in 1962, the John Birch Society remained a continuous source of conservative pamphlets, magazines, and newsletters. The 1960s and 1970s saw considerable rightwing anti-​communist and white supremacist commentary from popular evangelical broadcasters like Billy James Hargis and Carl McIntire, not to mention H. L. Hunt’s Life Line, all of whom similarly iterated what Heather Hendershot (2011) describes as an “ultra” conservative discourse outside Buckley’s sanction. By the mid-​1970s, a sort of rival conservative media establishment emerged at the hands of New Right activists, including most prominently Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie (see DiBranco, this volume). Applying direct mail principles to political movement building, the New Right formed an array of conservative single-​issue groups. These groups—​like Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, which successfully campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment, and the National Rifle Association, which has reshaped popular and judicial understandings of the Second Amendment—​played important roles as newsmakers, setting and framing the terms of mass-​mediated national debates concerning

 

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race, gender, sexuality, and class, leading up to and throughout the Reagan administration. Meanwhile, New Right–​affiliated groups like the Eagle Forum, Accuracy in Media, and later the Media Research Center played a considerable role in promoting and gathering evidence claiming that the movement was beset by a “liberal media” establishment (Bauer 2017). No longer constrained by the National Review’s aspirations for an intellectual tenor, the New Right stoked the embers of a populist conservatism that flourished in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine made space for political talk radio innovators like Rush Limbaugh. As conservative mass media began achieving commercial viability in the 1990s, talk radio hosts like Limbaugh and national media outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Fox News soon eclipsed movement-​based conservatism as the primary impetus of news on the right ( Jamieson and Cappella 2008). This trend continued as conservative news blossomed in many varieties online. In the early years of the web, established conservative institutions took the lead in founding online forums and news sites, such as Townhall, an online news community launched by the Heritage Foundation in 1995. Yet, many more web denizens would visit the online aggregator the Drudge Report, founded by the idiosyncratic conservative Matt Drudge. As more users turned to the Internet for news and commentary in the early 2000s, news entrepreneurs from Andrew Breitbart to Michelle Malkin to Ben Shapiro have proven conservatives to be nimble in adopting emerging media forms from blogs and podcasts to online video streams. These sometimes unruly conservative media stars and online communities have put increasing pressures on the Republican Party “from below,” influencing the contours of conservative politics.

Defining “Conservative News Cultures” For much of the twentieth century, when professional journalism was defined according to “high modern” values like impartiality and objectivity, many viewed right-​wing news with trepidation. From Robert McCormick to Richard Viguerie, from Fulton Lewis Jr. to Rush Limbaugh, right-​wing publishers and broadcasters were often accused of irresponsibility or unprofessional behavior at best, demagoguery at worst. All the while, sympathetic readers and listeners have relied on various mixtures of both journalistic professional and right-​wing media outlets to make sense of the news of the day. In some cases, the gap between how a particular issue or event was reported by mainstream news media and by a right-​wing commentator may have proved instrumental in helping consumers realize their previously unacknowledged ideological dispositions. In other cases, consuming right-​wing news may have allowed self-​identified ideologues

 



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to imagine themselves as part of a broader right-​wing public or movement. In yet other cases, conservative commentators may have helped draw in new publics by speaking to grievances and frustrations in novel ways—​especially to those frustrations not addressed by competing pundits or activists. From the late 1940s onward, as “conservative” became an increasingly salient identification among those on the right, consumption of right-​wing periodicals and radio broadcasts helped mobilize and synchronize self-​identified conservatives not only around abstract ideological beliefs but also through the daily travails of mediated political conflict; it also helped to cultivate an attachment to conservatism as a social identity (Mason 2018). This quotidian production and consumption of conservative news and the circulation of that news within and beyond the modern conservative movement combine to produce what we term conservative news cultures. This book’s aim is to bring focus to conservative news cultures as a crucial area for academic inquiry. We write at a moment when the vast power of conservative news cultures to affect the circulation and norms of political discourse could not be rendered more starkly. Most days, Donald J. Trump tunes in to Fox & Friends, a cable talk show whose sometimes conspiratorial news judgment is often reflected in the president’s trademark early morning tweets. Those tweets are themselves treated as news—​the controversial ones covered breathlessly by mainstream political reporters across mediums. The president’s supporters like and retweet his posts, spreading their content among likeminded friends and followers across platforms, while his detractors retweet with snarky rejoinders. Often rejoinder tweets themselves go viral, giving quaternary life to bits and pieces of news originating in the judgment of Fox News reporters, editors, and commentators. While conservative news cultures are by no means unique to our hypermediated present, Trump’s tweet storms offer an example that keenly illustrates the multifaceted nature of this object of analysis. Understanding the phenomenon requires inquiry into no fewer than four sites of meaning-​making activity: news production, news consumption and sharing practices, the dialectical relationship between news producers and audiences, and the agency of newsmakers. Studies foregrounding a single site will not necessarily shed light on others. For example, an ethnography of the Fox & Friends production process would yield little insight into how average viewers experience watching the program, let alone how Trump chooses what to tweet from it. Likewise, a rhetorical analysis of Trump tweets might have little to say about the news values of the sources he incorporates into those tweets, not to mention the expectations of those who consume news vicariously through them. It is only practical that various researchers will concentrate their attention on particular sites of conservative news culture. Yet, our hope is that as scholars continue to elucidate particular

 

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cases, they will increasingly build interconnections and render insights that span broader circuits of conservative news production and consumption. As the interdisciplinary variety of this volume attests, to study conservative news cultures is not to adhere to a particular theoretical or methodological approach or tradition. Like Stuart Allan (2010), we use the term news culture to avoid the sometimes rigid dichotomy between media and society, emphasizing the way in which both objects mutually constitute one another. We pluralize the term to foreground the variegated byproducts of this co-​constitution—​ news varies according to the words and actions of newsmakers, according to the judgments of particular reporters and outlets, according to cultural and political economic structures of circulation, and according to the myriad interpretive frameworks employed by audiences. A particular news culture results from consistent practices or patterns of meaning making that emerge between and among these sites of production, circulation, and consumption. For our purposes, a news culture is conservative insofar as it involves forms of media production, circulation, consumption, or identification by institutions and actors who are associated with the extended infrastructure of or discourse produced by the modern conservative movement in the United States. That movement—​initially composed of neoliberal, traditionalist, and anti-​communist intellectual strands—​cohered in the mid-​1940s and has been a recognizable, if historically contingent, force in US political culture and beyond ever since (Nash 1998; Burns 2004). There is a long-​standing tendency, epitomized most recently by intellectual historian Corey Robin, to reduce modern conservatism to a single drive: “the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back” (Robin 2017, 4). While we do not discount the impact of this reactionary impulse in fostering conservative thought and activism in the United States and beyond, it is too narrow a framework for understanding the capaciousness of news on the right. Indeed, from its outset modern conservatism has been composed of an array of oft-​feuding personalities and ideological tendencies. The movement’s internal contradictions, both personal and political, have historically resulted in a panoply of media outlets with varied and oft-​competing ideological projects (neoliberal, neoconservative, paleoconservative, etc.), policy emphases (anti-​abortion, pro-​gun rights, etc.), and styles and tones (from the high-​brow National Review, to the middle-​brow Conservative Digest, to low-​brow talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh). Far from “noise,” such conservative media plurality results in many discrete, though often overlapping and intersecting, news cultures—​ways of making sense of daily occurrences, patterned to support, justify, or otherwise resonate with the various beliefs historically associated with modern conservatism.

 



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An Imperative for Journalism Studies and Beyond While multiple disciplines have unique contributions to make to the study of conservative news cultures, the interdisciplinary field of journalism studies has a central role to play. Michael Schudson (2000, 56)  once observed that, despite the wide variety of societies in which it can be found, journalism consistently functions as the “social coordination of individuals and groups through shared symbols and meanings.” He added that, among other traits, the practice of journalism nearly always presents itself as conveying information and commentary on contemporary affairs, through a discourse that takes itself to be publicly important and truthful, while addressing a dispersed public audience (57). Journalism studies scholars, who have embraced this capacious view of journalism, have ventured far beyond the positivist approaches that dominated much of journalism and mass communication research of the mid-​twentieth century. These researchers have cultivated a wide variety of intellectual methods and theoretical frameworks that will prove helpful in analyzing the institutional dynamics, meaning-​making and identity-​constructing processes, and social-​ coordinating aspects of conservative news cultures. To take conservative news seriously, however, journalism studies scholarship must continue expanding its horizons and scope. As John Nerone (2013, 17) has put it, much of journalism studies has centered its analysis on “a historically specific form of journalism in historically specific news organizations,” namely, journalism as “it is exercised by professional journalists working in industrially organized newsrooms under the supervision of editors, usually in newspapers.” As the professional newspaper—​and high modern journalism, more generally—​loses its once hegemonic social role, journalism studies scholars have rightly expanded their focus to include other journalistic forms, both the emergent and the long neglected. To make sense of the wide range of institutions and practices through which publics assemble narratives of political life and coordinate social action, journalism scholars are taking more seriously literary journalism (Forde 2008; Bak and Reynolds 2011), left social movement journalism (Atton and Hamilton 2008; Downing 2000), community and ethnic journalism (Matsaganis, Katz, and Ball-​Rokeach 2011; Lauterer 2006), tabloid journalism (Gripsrud 2000; Zelizer 2009), and other genres. Yet, journalism scholars have been slow to recognize conservative news and commentary as a rich site of inquiry (Bauer 2018). As right-​wing populist movements have shaken the political landscape in countries across the globe, ignoring conservative and right-​leaning news cultures is no longer an option for journalism studies. Not only does conservative news play a powerful role informing its audiences, but also it provides a key vantage

 

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point for analyzing the social rituals, institutions, and sense-​making processes constituting the journalistic field more generally. Research into conservative news will feed into analysis of key problematics and themes in journalism studies, such as the analysis of how journalists establish cultural authority and legitimacy (Carlson 2017; Zelizer 1990), shifting conceptions of professionalization (Waisbord 2013; Schudson and Anderson 2009), relations between news outlets and their publics (Nord 2001; Usher 2016), news institutions and agenda setting in changing media environments (Guo and McCombs 2015), and emerging work into the affective and emotional dimensions of news production and sharing (Papacharissi 2015; Wahl-​Jorgensen 2019). Research into conservative news will also introduce new questions regarding the political economy of media, as much of this research has focused on commercial and state-​funded media, while conservatives have relied heavily on patronage networks to build much of their news infrastructure. In areas of overlap among journalism studies and political communication, historically rich and nuanced accounts of conservative news cultures will have much to add to analyses of mediated partisanship. At the same time, greater engagement with existing research in journalism and media studies will offer richer accounts of meso-​and macro-​level contexts in which conservative news cultures take shape. Spurts of growth and change in conservative news institutions cannot be isolated from the cultural processes and contexts in which they are enmeshed. The enormous popularity and influence of the Drudge Report, for example, cannot be separated from the decline of professional journalism’s hegemony, the burgeoning of online citizen journalism, and the powerful dynamics of online attention that favor sites establishing prominence early in the development of a digital genre. We intend this volume to serve as a step toward more reflexivity and greater interconnection in this nascent interdisciplinary subfield. As this field grows, we hope to see it become an area of scholarly debate and dialogue where scholars scrutinize and build upon each other’s theories. Centering conservative news cultures will also give life to new problematics rising directly from this line of inquiry. Yet, researchers studying conservative news will still have to navigate key tensions surrounding structure and agency. Popular and scholarly critiques of right-​wing media can too easily slip into “magic bullet” discourses—​presuming conservatives are merely hapless dupes of the machinations of right-​wing media owners and producers. While this concern deserves critical scrutiny, so too do opposing assumptions of market populism that frame conservative news outlets as merely reflecting their consumers’ pre-​existing tastes and dispositions. Figuring out why particular media circulate widely among certain groups and the significance of such circulation requires thinking of media outlets as “neither mere servants of demand nor overlords capable of dictating exactly what news content consumers must accept” (Nadler 2016, 10). Scholars must grapple

 



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with the negotiations that occur among conservative news outlets, their audiences, and the larger array of political and social actors that shape narratives of public life.

An Opening Salvo The chapters in this book each explore particular conservative news cultures while emphasizing how their analysis fits within the conservative news subfield. This collection focuses mostly on conservative news cultures centered in the United States, though several chapters speak to questions of theory and method that transcend national context. Our contributors draw on cultural history, political sociology, cultural studies, and rhetorical analysis to study conservative news cultures across several decades and tied to outlets representing multiple media formats, from print to television to online communities. These authors speak to intersecting questions and topics ranging from the origins of the notion of “liberal media” to connections between conservative media structures and movements to the impacts of conservative news cultures on political life in the United States and beyond. We have organized the chapters around three loose thematic sections: mobilizing political identities, building conservative media infrastructure, and legitimizing conservative discourses. No bright lines separate these themes, and there are considerable overlaps among them. The chapters in this book take up each theme as situated in different historical moments or media formats, so each section provides an opportunity for comparative perspectives and historical depth along one axis of inquiry. The first four chapters focus on the construction of imagined communities and political identities. Much of the research on conservative media to date has focused on the beliefs and ideologies such outlets promote. These chapters turn, instead, to explore how conservative media have attempted, with varying success, to foster a sense of community or collective political identification among their audiences. As the chapters in this section demonstrate, conservative media outlets have often promoted a sense of conservatism not only as a set of principles, policy preferences, or beliefs but also as an integral aspect of personal identity. Conservative media negotiate the boundaries of conservative identity as it relates to others identities—​most notably race, gender, class, religion, and regional loyalties. Each of these chapters illustrates why much of the emotional attachment to and passion for conservatism may be understood through the prism of identity. Political psychologists have increasingly conceptualized the formation of political identities as a crucial factor animating political activity (e.g., Mason 2018; Huddy and Bankert 2017). Yet, we should be cautious not to assume that the processes that drive people to take on political identities must be

 

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similar across social contexts. Analyzing how conservative news helps formulate and mobilize political identities may provide critical insights on social processes that intensify (or de-​intensify) emotional attachments to political identities in particular, historical moments. In “ ‘From a Christian Perspective’: News/​Talk in Evangelical Mass Media,” Mark Ward Sr. examines the power of news programs produced by contemporary networks of conservative evangelical broadcasters. Ward argues that the programming of these networks positions a “Christian worldview” as a conservative political identity inseparable from religious practice and Christian modes of apprehending the world. Ward analyzes how conservative Christian news producers lay claim to a legitimacy that is undergirded by biblical authority as they set news agendas and frame stories. Ward situates contemporary Christian radio within a long history of evangelical struggles over access to broadcasting resources and locates the current genre formation of evangelical news within the United States’ deregulated and highly consolidated broadcast markets. In his chapter on “Containing ‘Country Music Marxism,’ ” Reece Peck tracks the populist stylistic resonances between country western music and Fox News Channel programming. Using country musician John Rich’s 2009 song “Detroit” as a case study, Peck demonstrates how Fox News employed its unique mix of tabloid aesthetics and populist epistemic appeals to conscribe potentially progressive interpretations of Rich’s song. In doing so, Peck illuminates how Fox endows its conservative political news brand with affective power and social meaning. Tracking the migration of country style from the music sector to the news sector, Peck elucidates how political-​taste alignments factor into conservative news cultures. His chapter serves as a call for greater scholarly attention to the way conservative news actively partisanizes national taste divisions while relying on those very divisions in framing its news coverage. In “Weaponizing Victimhood: Discourses of Oppression and the Maintenance of Supremacy on the Right,” Lee Bebout analyzes a rhetoric of “weaponized victimhood” that he argues plays a crucial role in uniting disparate factions of the contemporary American Right. Weaponized victimhood speaks to a felt sense of loss of power and esteem among social groups facing challenges to their traditionally privileged status positions. In Bebout’s account, this expression of grievance takes on a hyperbolic form through assertions that groups such as whites, men, and Christians face great social oppression. They are portrayed as victims of such projected threats as a “War on Christmas” and “feminazi” activists. Bebout argues that such victimization narratives circulate across various types of conservative and right-​wing media—​from Fox News to alt right and men’s rights websites. A common rhetoric of victimization cultivates a shared affective sensibility among groups ranging from avowed white supremacists to anti-​feminists to others reacting against perceived challenge to their social power and standing.

 



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In her chapter on “NRA Media and Second Amendment Identity Politics,” Dawn Gilpin considers the National Rifle Association (NRA) as not merely a lobbying outfit, trade association, or hobbyist group, but as a full-​fledged mediasphere. Since the early 2000s, the NRA has aggressively expanded its footprint within the broader right-​wing media environment—​it publishes four print magazines and a highly integrated array of micro-​targeted online print and video content, social media platforms, and original online television programming. Via a content analysis of NRA.org, a site that aggregates and prioritizes content from across the group’s multimedia platforms, Gilpin employs critical discourse analysis to illuminate the site’s populist themes and rhetorical styles. She finds that the NRA combines the trappings of news genres and right-​wing discourses with populist modes of expression to amplify and reinforce the deep affective ties between gun ownership and conservative political identity. The middle three chapters focus on the construction of conservative news infrastructure. Despite the well-​worn association between conservatism and traditionalism, conservative media has been a dynamic force, often tapping into affordances of new technologies and leveraging shifts in regulations with as much, or arguably more, fervor and skill as counterparts on the left. Scholarship on conservative news needs to extend its analysis beyond conservative news texts, their producers, and the audiences who make meaning out of those texts. Scholars must also grapple with how conservative media structures interact with broader media landscapes and other facets of political life. In a commercial media system, the dominate understanding of why particular news outlets spread and thrive is frequently assumed to be a matter of meritocracy: the kinds of news that most match a community’s tastes will succeed in the marketplace. Yet, supply does not merely chase demand. Building an influential news outlet entails devoting resources and investing in efforts to mobilize audiences and cultivate their tastes and expectations (Nadler 2016). The chapters in this section offer insights on how conservatives have built their own news infrastructures, how their infrastructures have influenced broader circuits of news flow, and the conditions that have enabled both. In “Making Media Safe for Corporate Power: Market Libertarian Discourse in the 1940s and Beyond,” Victor Pickard argues that a corporate libertarian vision of media policy established the discursive terrain in which conservative media ultimately thrived. The corporate libertarian approach conceives of news media as a commodity—​rather than a public resource—​best left under private control and ownership. Pickard argues that this vision became a hegemonic common sense that came to dominate US media policy discourses—​thanks, in part, to a propagandistic influence campaign executed by corporate interests. This led to insufficient resources invested in a democratic news system. Such a policy orientation created conditions for a commercial media system driven by

 

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a competition to meet consumer demand. Yet, as Pickard suggests, it also created a space for right-​wing media activists to mobilize and cultivate conservative publics through outlets propped up by patronage networks and ideologically motivated venture capital. In her chapter on “Conservative News and Movement Infrastructure,” Alex DiBranco expands our thinking of conservative media beyond traditional forms. DiBranco notes that, while a first generation of conservative media activists invested in more or less traditional media enterprises (e.g., magazines, newsletters, radio programming), by the 1970s movement activists associated with the New Right were investing in think tanks and foundations—​not only diversifying the conservative movement infrastructure but also complicating the variegated means of sourcing and circulating conservative news and commentary. DiBranco demonstrates how the movement’s turn toward nonprofit organizational structures in the 1970s enabled its institutional proliferation. She maps the result—​a dizzying array of funders, organizations, publications, and activists whose efforts continue to wield outsized influence over both the conservative movement and the news cultures that surround it. In her chapter on “The British Right-​Wing Mainstream and the European Referendum,” Angela Phillips uses the 2016 Brexit campaign as a window into how the right-​wing establishment press in the United Kingdom influences the country’s broad political agenda. While scholars have tended to emphasize the outsized role of the BBC as a “trust anchor” (Wessells, Ekelin, Kemp, and Forsberg 2018), whose journalistic professionalism mitigates some of the polarizing effects of the United Kingdom’s partisan tabloid print culture, Phillips demonstrates how the latter played a crucial agenda-​setting role in the European referendum debate—​exploiting the Remain/​Leave dichotomy, and the BBC’s “strategic balance,” to frame the debate within discursive limits set by the conservative elite. The result further undermined trust in British broadcasting while largely excluding organized labor from the referendum debate. Phillips’s chapter provides interesting comparative fodder for scholars of right-​wing news in the US context, as the EU referendum in many ways replicated the structural conditions that underpin the two-​party horse race coverage common in US mainstream political reporting. This book’s final four chapters turn toward the broad discursive templates that conservative journalists, commentators, and media activists have developed for understanding their work and worldviews against the backdrop of professional journalistic norms and historical shifts in common sense concerning social issues. As discussed at this chapter’s outset, the early conservative movement faced a national media narrative that depicted its leadership and grassroots both as composed of histrionic figures toiling at the political fringe. Attempting to combat this narrative, conservative news cultures positioned themselves within

 



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a broader mediated terrain of respectability politics. Whether by policing the boundaries of “responsible” conservatism—​especially as they pertain to conspiratorial analysis and the shifting social acceptance of overt appeals to white supremacy—​or by identifying and narrating the workings of a “liberal media” elite, conservative movement leaders developed discursive frameworks for understanding politics that have long since taken on lives of their own beyond their initial movement context. Among the central issues driving the conservative movement’s discursive productivity was the question of race and racism in the United States. In his chapter, “National Review and the Changing Narrative of Civil Rights Memory: 1968–​ 2016,” Robert Greene II analyzes the National Review’s shifting narratives of the contentious relationship between the modern conservative movement, Martin Luther King Jr., and the broader civil rights movement. National Review writers largely opposed the civil rights movement up until the mid-​1960s, casting Black freedom activists and their goals as threats to civilized order and the spirit of the US Constitution. Yet, the National Review would ultimately take on a leading role in reconsidering the conservative movement’s animosity toward King and civil rights—​drawing parallels between conservative principles and civil rights claims, and even making fraught color-​blind conservative claims to King’s legacy. The National Review played a crucial role in constructing the “liberal media” trope in the mid-​1950s, as Julie Lane’s chapter in this volume, “Cultivating Distrust of the Mainstream Media,” compellingly demonstrates. Lane traces the English origins of “the Establishment” as a rhetorical figure and shows how National Review writers successfully appropriated it, constructing a unifying, besieged mentality that opened space for the nascent conservative media countersphere. These writers placed a critique of media bias within a broader narrative of a smug and elite “Liberal Establishment” that operated across many institutions to, in Buckley’s words, “set the bounds of permissible opinions.” Through closely analyzing two early National Review columns dedicated to media criticism along with internal discussions among key writers, Lane adds nuance to previous historical accounts of the origins of this pillar of conservative news discourse. She notes that the National Review made a case of liberal bias in media that was not solely tied to a critique of the professional objectivity. Critics writing in the magazine saw purportedly objective professional coverage as tainted with the same bias as liberal journals of opinion. She argues that the National Review “claimed that individual media outlets did not simply tilt left on some issues but worked together to demand conformity with the entire liberal agenda.” Tackling the continued existence of the “liberal media” trope head on, Anthony DiMaggio’s chapter—​“Slanting the News: Media Bias and Its Effects”—​ investigates whether consumption of Fox, MSNBC, and CNN is associated with

 

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formation of conservative or liberal political attitudes. Analyzing public opinion data collected by the Pew Research Center between 2004 and 2016, DiMaggio’s statistical regression analysis finds little evidence of a liberal polarizing effect for CNN and MSNBC consumption on political attitudes. On the other hand, he finds both selective exposure and polarization to be at work on the right, particularly in relation to Fox News consumption. DiMaggio’s findings corroborate those of network analysts (Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 2018) who have identified a structural asymmetry in political polarization within online media—​with right-​wing news audiences more insular and their preferred media more ideologically self-​reinforcing than their counterparts on the liberal left. DiMaggio clarifies that asymmetrical polarization in general, and conservative news in particular, has measurable effects on political attitude formation among cable television consumers, not only consumers of online content. In his chapter, “Bridging the Marginal and the Mainstream,” Mark Major further expands our understanding of “liberal media” discourse by analyzing its historical formation in terms of public sphere theory. Advancing a discursive institutionalist methodological approach, rooted in sustained analysis of the actors, ideas, and institutions that give conservative news its cultural form and force, Major asks: how did the notion of the “liberal media” come to have such influence within and beyond conservative news cultures? Major’s approach explicitly connects conservative news infrastructures with the production of “liberal media” discourse. He contends that conservative journalists, commentators, and media activists began conceptualizing the “liberal media” within the institutions of the conservative countersphere by the 1950s and early 1960s. Once this discourse had been crystalized and legitimized among conservative commentators and their eager audiences, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and other prominent Republican voices promoted its circulation within the national public sphere, where it became a template for understanding and judging professional journalism far beyond the conservative countersphere. The book concludes with a mapping of several lines of academic inquiry that, we contend, speak to the yet-​unrealized field of conservative news studies. Scholars have been researching various components of conservative news cultures for decades, but too often disciplinary silos, differing methodological assumptions, and a lack of standardized terminology have precluded the sort of focused scholarly dialogue that typically constitutes a field. Our final chapter highlights the extant disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates that a robust field of conservative news studies would ideally both weave together and build upon. These chapters are by no means exhaustive of the wide array of outlets, audiences, and interactions that comprise conservative news cultures. No one volume could conclusively document and analyze all conservative news and its myriad impacts. Instead, we intend this volume to serve as an opening salvo in

 



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a growing interdisciplinary conversation about conservative news, both in the United States and hopefully around the world. Wherever readers spy a gap in this volume’s coverage, we encourage them to take strides to fill it. While the modern conservative movement knows no shortage of egoists, and indeed prides itself on individualism, conservative news cultures are the work of multiple generations of conservative publishers, editors, reporters, commentators, readers, listeners, and viewers—​all working collectively to make conservative meaning out of the news of their day. Understanding the scale and nuance of conservative news cultures will require a similarly collective endeavor on the part of researchers.

References Allan, Stuart. 2010. News Culture. 3rd ed. New York: Open University Press. Atton, Chris, and James F. Hamilton. 2008. Alternative Journalism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bak, John S., and Bill Reynolds. 2011. Literary Journalism Across the Globe: Journalistic Traditions and Transnational Influences. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Bauer, A. J. 2017. “Before ‘Fair and Balanced’: Conservative Media Activism and the Rise of the New Right.” Dissertation, New York University. Bauer, A. J. 2018. “Journalism History and Conservative Erasure.” American Journalism 35 (1): 2–​26. Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. 2018. Network Propaganda:  Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Brock, David. 2004. The Republican Noise Machine:  Right-​Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy. New York: Crown Publishers. Burns, Jennifer. 2004. “In Retrospect:  George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945.” Reviews in American History 32: 447–​462. Carlson, Matt. 2017. Journalistic Authority: Legitimating News in the Digital Era. New York: Columbia University Press. Crawford, Alan. 1980. Thunder on the Right:  The ‘New Right’ and the Politics of Resentment. New York: Pantheon. Downing, John D.  H. 2000. Radical Media:  Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Forde, Kathy Roberts. 2008. Literary Journalism on Trial:  Masson v.  New  Yorker and the First Amendment. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Gripsrud, Jostein. 2000. “Tabloidization, Popular Journalism and Democracy.” In Tabloid Tales: Global Debates over Media Standards, edited by Colin Sparks and John Tulloch, 285–​ 300. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Guo, Lei, and Maxwell McCombs. 2015. The Power of Information Networks: New Directions for Agenda Setting. New York: Routledge. Hallin, Daniel C. 1994. We Keep America on Top of the World: Television Journalism and the Public Sphere. New York: Routledge. Hemmer, Nicole. 2016. Messengers of the Right:  Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hendershot, Heather. 2011. What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-​Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.

 

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Huddy, Leonie, and Alexa Bankert. 2017. “Political Partisanship as a Social Identity.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, and Joseph N. Cappella. 2008. Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. New York: Oxford University Press. Lauterer, Jock. 2006. Community Journalism: Relentlessly Local. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Mason, Lilliana. 2018. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Matsaganis, Matthew D., Vikki S. Katz, and Sandra J. Ball-​Rokeach. 2011. Understanding Ethnic Media: Producers, Consumers, and Societies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mindich, David T. Z. 1998. Just the Facts: How Objectivity Came to Define American Journalism. New York: New York University Press. Nadler, Anthony M. 2016. Making the News Popular:  Mobilizing U.S. News Audiences. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Nash, George H. 1998. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Nerone, John. 2013. “Why Journalism History Matters to Journalism Studies.” American Journalism 30 (1): 15–​28. Nord, David Paul. 2001. Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Papacharissi, Zizi. 2015. “Toward New Journalism(s).” Journalism Studies 16 (1): 27–​40. Pasley, Jeffrey L. 2003. The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Phillips-​Fein, Kim. 2009. Invisible Hands:  The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. New York: W.W. Norton. Pickard, Victor W. 2014. America’s Battle for Media Democracy:  The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform. Communication, Society, and Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Robin, Corey. 2017. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Schudson, Michael. 2000. “The Domain of Journalism Studies Around the Globe.” Journalism 1 (1): 55–​59. Schudson, Michael. 2001. “The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism.” Journalism 2 (2): 149–​170. Schudson, Michael, and Chris Anderson. 2009. “Objectivity, Professionalism, and Truth Seeking in Journalism.” In The Handbook of Journalism Studies, edited by Karin Wahl-​Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch, 88–​101. New York: Routledge. Sevareid, Eric, Fred W. Friendly, Jack Beck, and CBS Television Network. (1962) 2005. Thunder on the Right. Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities & Sciences. Usher, Nikki. 2016. Interactive Journalism:  Hackers, Data, and Code. Urbana:  University of Illinois Press. Wahl-​Jorgensen, Karin. 2019. Emotions, Media and Politics. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Waisbord, Silvio. 2013. Reinventing Professionalism:  Journalism and News in Global Perspective. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Wessels, Bridgett, Annelie Ekelin, Emelie Kempe, and Anette Forsberg. 2018. “Regional Press as ‘Trust Anchor’ in Global Digital Communication: The Voices of Journalism in Southern Sweden.” Paper presented at the Sixty-​Eighth ICA Conference, Prague, Czech Republic. Zelizer, Barbie. 1990. “Achieving Journalistic Authority Through Narrative.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7 (4): 366–​376. Zelizer, Barbie. 2009. The Changing Faces of Journalism: Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness. New York: Routledge.

 

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“From a Christian Perspective” News/​Talk in Evangelical Mass Media Mark Ward Sr .

The literature on the conservative media establishment is extensive and growing. Yet, after the televangelism scandals of the late 1980s and presumed “rise and fall” (Hadden 1993) of the genre, the conservative religious media establishment has received less attention. A few scholars have mined the “electronic church” for artifacts of evangelical culture (Apostolidis 2000; Hendershot 2004; Kintz and Lesage 1998). Yet the focus of these studies on evangelical programming as cultural artifact, though valuable, necessarily takes less account of the electronic church as a living media enterprise whose product is subject over time to changes in technology and regulation. Far from fading after the scandals of the 1980s, the electronic church has seen rapid ownership concentration due to media deregulation (Ward 2009, 2012, 2013, 2018a) and the emergence of religious media oligopolies that now dominate a genre that serves the one in four Americans who identify as evangelical Christians (Pew Research Center 2015) and is consumed daily by one in five adults (Barna Group 2005). Thus, while earlier studies focused on producers of evangelical programming and were written largely before the effects of media deregulation and industry consolidation were fully felt, the present chapter focuses on the networks that distribute programming and whose oligopolistic position makes possible a centralization and homogenization of the evangelical message to an unprecedented degree. White evangelical Protestantism is, by percent of population, the nation’s single largest religious tradition (Putnam and Campbell 2010). As an institution of American evangelicalism, today’s electronic church encompasses 10 national radio networks that each control between 100 and 500 outlets; some 30 programmers each syndicated on up to 2,000 affiliates and who attract up to 6 million weekly listeners; more than 3,400 radio stations (one-​fifth of the US total) that air religious teaching, talk, or music formats; a dozen television networks 17

 

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carried by all major cable and satellite providers with a reach of 100  million households; and some 50 syndicated programmers with weekly audiences of up to 7 million viewers (Ward 2016). And through the increasing convergence of broadcast and digital media, millions more access this content on demand as conglomerates now stream across every digital media platform (Ward 2018a). The leading evangelical broadcast network alone generates 107 million monthly app sessions, 31 million monthly computer sessions, 42 million Facebook fans, and 15 million email subscribers through its web-​based platforms (Salem Web Network 2018). While preaching and music remain staples of the religious genre, media consolidation and the rise of large evangelical networks has made production and distribution of Christian conservative news/​talk programming a major emphasis. The Christian Broadcasting Network’s (2018) nightly CBN News draws one million daily viewers through its carriage on multiple cable and satellite channels that reach 97 percent of US television markets. “Christian radio,” however, serves an even greater agenda-​setting function for evangelicals (Wrench 2016). Top-​of-​the-​hour news is distributed by Salem Media Group (2018a) to 1,100 affiliates “in every major market and in all 50 states” and by USA Radio (2018) to 500 affiliates, while the American Family News Network (2018) claims 1,200 broadcast, print, and online affiliates for its daily newscast. In talk radio, though evangelicals are fans of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, these two conservative talkers address moral and cultural concerns less than 5  percent of the time (Mort 2010). So evangelicals tune in by the millions to hear a “Christian perspective” on social issues and other news through the nine daily talk shows produced by the Salem Radio Network, the six by American Family Radio, the five by USA Radio, and daily syndicated talk shows such as Focus on the Family (2018), which is aired by more than 2,000 affiliates and attracts 6.3  million weekly listeners; Jay Sekulow Live, heard on 1,050 affiliates (American Center for Law and Justice 2018); and Washington Watch, carried by nearly 400 affiliates (Family Research Council 2018). This vast repertoire of evangelical news/​talk programming, however, must navigate a paradox. When discussing the news of the day, “economic conservatives ground their authority in empirical rationality, even if the ‘outrage industry’ thrives on exaggeration and misrepresentation of the endless statistics they recite. Religious conservatives, however, anchor their worldview in faith” (Sumser 2016, 107). The latter, then, must play off empirically based secular rationality against divinely revealed religious authority. The paradox is rhetorically overcome, as will be seen, by employing the coded phrase “Christian worldview,” which, in turn, furnishes a warrant for filtering all news through the prism of an authoritative, divinely inspired, and “inerrant” Bible. This code enables American evangelicals to sustain themselves as a “rhetorical community”

 



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(Miller 1993, 1994) distinct from economic, small-​government, and libertarian conservatives. Thus, while teaching, preaching, and music programming sustain the community’s inward application of a “Christian worldview” to private life, news/​talk sustains outward application to public life.

Waiting for the “Right” Moment Though today’s format of evangelical news/​talk is a creature of media deregulation since the 1990s, the genre also demonstrates how “evangelical mass media of the 21st century are best understood . . . in terms of continuities within the American evangelical subculture that predate electronic media, span all media forms, and guide the community today” (Steiner 2016, 7). After the public humiliation of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial,” evangelicals retreated inward and, during the second and third quarters of the twentieth century, focused on building their own subcultural institutions (Balmer 2010). Yet the maturation of those institutions was a necessary condition for what came next: “The infrastructure the evangelicals had constructed in earnest following the Scopes trial—​colleges, seminaries, publishing houses, media concerns—​was by [the 1970s] sufficiently established so that it could provide a foundation for evangelicals’ return to the public square” (55). In the early days of radio, religious broadcasters’ opportunities to address political issues were constrained by multiple concerns. Congress in 1927 mandated that the “airwaves” are publicly owned, so that broadcasters must obtain federal licenses on the condition that they serve the public. Under the business-​ minded Coolidge and Hoover administrations, however, the new Federal Radio Commission (FRC) emphasized commercial development of radio and for a time actively considered classifying religious stations as propaganda outlets that served only a small segment of the public (Ward 2017). In fact, regulators in Canada were so appalled by radio preachers who broadcast attacks on other religious viewpoints that they banned “single-​faith” stations altogether (Brooks 2003). For its part, the FRC in 1931 revoked the radio license of Los Angeles preacher Robert “Fighting Bob” Shuler, a fundamentalist who broadcast vitriolic attacks on city politicians, Jews, Catholics, and other evangelists. Shuler sued the agency on First Amendment grounds, but the Supreme Court sided with the FRC. “[If] one in possession of a permit to broadcast in interstate commerce,” the justices ruled, “may . . . offend the religious susceptibilities of thousands, inspire political distrust and civic discord . . . then this great science [of radio], instead of a boon, will become a scourge, and the nation a theater for the display of individual passions and the collision of personal interests” (Trinity United Methodist Church, South, v. Federal Radio Commission 1932). Thus, the

 

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mainstream of evangelical broadcasters stuck to positively preaching their own gospel rather than negatively attacking others (Ward 1994). The advent of commercial radio networks in 1927 at first seemed a boon to evangelical broadcasters: they needed only to purchase program time to gain a national audience, without the expenses of operating their own stations. But the “miracle” of radio also stirred fears that the medium could mesmerize the masses. On-​air fundraising was therefore controversial, so that NBC in 1928 and CBS in 1931 barred the sale of airtime for religious programs. Instead, the two networks donated time for Protestant broadcasts to the theologically liberal Federal Council of Churches (Hangen 2002; Ward 2013). Except for the decade 1934–​1944, when the upstart Mutual Broadcasting System accepted paid-​time religious programs, independent evangelical broadcasters were shut out. Network bans on paid-​time religious programs lasted through the 1950s, by which time television was ascendant and radio was transitioning away from network programming and to the specialized niche formats known today. During World War II, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) suspended licensing of new radio stations. In a postwar rush to satisfy pent-​up public demand and license new outlets, the agency permitted commercial religious stations as early as 1946 (Ward 1994). These stations could thus sell program time to preachers, but their number grew by only about one per year through the 1950s and only slightly more during the 1960s. During those two decades, the best-​known Christian anti-​communist broadcasts were Carl McIntire’s Twentieth Century Reformation Hour and Billy James Hargis’s Christian Crusade (Hendershot 2011). Though McIntire at his height claimed a network of more than six hundred stations and Hargis five hundred, most affiliates were locally owned independent outlets in smaller media markets. They tended to lack in signal strength and coverage, often did not broadcast after sunset, were not full-​ time religious stations with loyal religious audiences, scheduled McIntire and Hargis when they saw fit, and did not coordinate broadcast times with other stations. Also working against McIntire, Hargis, and other Christian anti-​communist broadcasters was the fairness doctrine, implemented in 1949 by the FCC. The rule required stations to cover public issues, fairly represent opposing views, and provide time for citizens to rebut any views presented on the air. After McIntire’s organization purchased a radio station in 1965, he fought a running battle over the fairness doctrine with the FCC and was ultimately shut down in 1973. For his part, Hargis sparked a controversy that led to a landmark 1969 Supreme Court ruling. When his program attacked a book that was critical of 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, the author approached a local Pennsylvania station that aired the program, requested airtime to rebut Hargis, and was refused. The

 



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author sued station owner Red Lion Broadcasting and the high court unanimously upheld the fairness doctrine: A license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a radio frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens. There is nothing in the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his frequency with others. . . . It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount. (Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v.  Federal Communications Commission 1969) With the rise of the New Christian Right in the 1970s, the number of religious radio stations tripled during the decade from less than three hundred to more than a thousand (Ward 2013). Yet due to the Red Lion ruling, station owners feared airing overtly politicized preaching. Repeal of the fairness doctrine became the top priority of the National Religious Broadcasters association. After the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, the FCC in 1981 ditched the “trusteeship model” of broadcasting and ruled that the market best determines the public interest. By 1987 the agency rescinded the fairness doctrine. Thus, while the ultraconservative “cold war broadcasters went off the air because of the doctrine,” the current generation of conservative talkers “went on the air almost immediately after Reagan suspended the doctrine” (Hendershot 2011, 25). But while the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity is well known, the story of evangelical talk radio is less familiar. The issue-​oriented, live daily call-​ in talk format came to Christian radio in 1983 when Marlin Maddoux’s two-​ hour Point of View entered national syndication, enjoying a network of some 250 affiliates during the 1980s and 1990s. Still on the air, the program gave “a conservative Christian perspective on issues and current events that affect the family, schools, religious principles, and public policy  .  .  .  [with] guests that include media experts, educators, politicians, and best-​selling authors” (Melton, Lucas, and Stone 1997, 213). At about the same time, Bob Larson became the first evangelical “shock jock” when his daily two-​hour Talk-​Back with Bob Larson debuted in 1982. With an “abrasive, controversial style” and syndication on up to two hundred stations, Talk-​Back “became famous for Larson’s riveting dialogues with rock stars, reformed sinners, and therapists, and for on-​the-​air exorcisms and healings” (192). Yet Point of View and Talk-​Back were independently produced and depended on syndication, which in the 1980s and early 1990s meant purchasing time on independent stations one by one. As late as 1985, the FCC limited the number of radio stations a broadcaster could own to fourteen (seven in the AM band and seven in the FM). The cap was raised to twenty-​four

 

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(twelve in each band) in 1985; to thirty-​six (eighteen in each band) in 1992, when the FCC permitted broadcasters for the first time to own more than one AM or FM station in the same market; and to forty (twenty in each band) in 1994 (Ward 2009). Then Congress, in approving the Telecommunications Act of 1996, eliminated the national cap on how many radio stations a broadcaster could own. The impact was quickly felt. In 1996 alone, some 2,157 stations changed hands (Fratrik 2002). By 1997, station ownership in 86  percent of the nation’s fifty largest media markets was heavily or moderated concentrated, compared to 18 percent prior to the new law (Drushel 1998). Within six years, more than 40 percent of US radio stations were under new ownership (Sterling 2004), and the total number of radio station owners fell 33 percent (Williams and Roberts 2002). By 2002, at least twenty-​one radio groups owned more outlets than the pre-​1996 limit of 40 stations. These groups acquired more than 2,600 stations and by 2002 owned about 1 out of every 5 radio stations in the nation (DiCola and Thomson 2002). Among the twenty-​one largest radio groups in 2002 were evangelical broadcasters Educational Media Foundation (EMF), American Family Association (AFA), and Salem Communications (now Salem Media Group). Today EMF operates two networks, K-​LOVE and Air1, with a combined reach of more than 650 noncommercial FM stations and translators that broadcast contemporary Christian music and selected teaching/​preaching programs (Educational Media Foundation 2018). AFA’s American Family Radio (2018) boasts nearly 200  “listener-​supported” noncommercial FM stations that air news/​talk and preaching. For its part, Salem brought a new model to commercial Christian radio by acquiring stations with strong signals in major cities, a strategy “opposite of how most Christian broadcasters operate, where a common practice is to acquire large numbers of low-​power stations” (Abelman 2006, 215). In a few years, Salem became the nation’s third-​largest station owner in the top twenty-​ five media markets (Wilhelm 2005)  and today owns 115 stations, including 73 in the nation’s top twenty-​five media markets and twenty-​five in the top ten (Salem Media Group 2018b). Once these Christian radio consolidators went to work, by 2001 the number of network-​owned religious stations in the fifty largest markets significantly increased (Ward 2009). Big-​name syndicated preachers and Christian talk shows, which could afford network airtime, expanded their reach at the expense of lesser-​known syndicators (Ward 2012). Meanwhile, Salem realized it could not only sell airtime at higher rates to syndicated preachers and talkers but also produce its own talk shows and news service, distribute them via satellite, and charge stations in smaller markets to air Salem news/​talk. The result is today’s evangelical radio marketplace in which Salem dominates in major cities, Salem and USA Radio (founded by Maddoux in 1985) distribute

 



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news/​talk picked up by affiliates in smaller markets, and American Family Radio blankets the hinterlands with noncommercial stations and low-​power translators. All three further stream their content on demand via every digital media platform (Ward 2018a). Thus, where McIntire and Hargis broadcast their brand of Christian politics in a media universe of locally owned mom-​and-​pop stations and the constraints of the fairness doctrine, today’s evangelical news/​talk airs over large networks, is heard nationwide at the same time each weekday by loyal evangelical listeners, and is unfettered by any considerations of fairness.

Operationalizing a “Christian Worldview” The main consideration of evangelical news/​talk, which informs the news judgments of evangelical broadcasters, is captured in the ubiquitous phrase “From a Christian perspective.” The phrase operationalizes the concept of “Christian worldview,” a concept first popularized among evangelicals in the 1970s to bridge doctrinal differences between evangelical faith traditions and politically unite the movement under a shared banner with which to countervail the “secular humanist” worldview (Hankins 2008; Worthen 2013). This notion of a “Christian worldview,” however, is itself steeped in a curious history grounded in the paradox between religious authority and secular rationality. America’s First and Second Great Awakenings of the mid-​eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Balmer 2010), together with the constitutional disestablishment of any state church, made evangelicalism the dominant force in the new republic’s free religious marketplace (Finke and Starke 2005). Yet disestablishment, by casting off the traditional support for public morality, sparked a quest to find a new basis for virtuous self-​government (Noll 1994). Evangelicals of the nineteenth century found it in the Scottish Enlightenment, adapting the philosophy of common-​sense realism to maintain that biblical truths are self-​ evident and all people are naturally endowed with sufficient reason to grasp these truths through a plain reading of the scriptures. This common-​sense reasoning was buttressed by taking the view, first popularized in the seventeenth century by English natural philosopher Francis Bacon, that science consists of observation and classification. Thus, the Bible was conceived as a storehouse of facts that could be observed through reading the scriptures, so that classification of these facts would scientifically reveal underlying patterns from which divine laws could then be confidently derived (Marsden 1980). In this way, evangelicals “bought into foundationalism whole hog,” but rather than “founding universal, indubitable truth on rationalism or empiricism, evangelicalism simply argued that the right foundation for indubitable knowledge is the text of the Bible and the Bible alone” (Smith 2011, 150–​151). As a corollary, the doctrine

 

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of “inerrancy” emerged by the late nineteenth century and holds that if God cannot err, and if the Bible is God’s Word, then the Bible cannot err, where truth and error are determined by a “correspondence theory” in which truth is understood as that which corresponds to actual realities. The paradox between authority and rationality in evangelical news/​talk is thus resolved by a strategically ambiguous “Christian worldview” that casts biblical authority as a rational supposition derived by common-​sense reasoning from the scriptures. Seen in this light, the Bible becomes a rational framework through which to interpret the news of the day—​as suggested in the promotional statements, shown in Table 2.1, of the major evangelical radio news services. Similar themes of rational reasoning from sacred writ are representatively sounded in the opening “bumpers,” shown in Table 2.2, of the weekday talk shows aired over American Family Radio from midmorning through evening drivetime. Prominent in these examples of Christian radio news service promotions (Table 2.1) and talk show openings (Table 2.2) are concepts that flow from a “Christian worldview” including “biblical truth,” “Christian and traditional values,” “family focused,” “credible,” “Christian focus,” “Christian response,” “faith, family, and freedom,” and “light.” At the same time, a dualism defines the putative Christian worldview of evangelical news/​talk programming in opposition to “the liberal bias that characterizes so much of the ‘mainstream’ media,” “the ivory tower approach of the traditional networks,” “agenda-​filled news reporting,” “the bondage of the mainstream media,” and liberals who “know so much that isn’t so” and place “restrictions on Christians,” even as they turn their backs on God rather than honor him as the source of American liberty. The forces of “light” and “freedom” are engaged in “battles for biblical truth,” on which “depend the survival of Christian civilization,” against the forces of “darkness” and “the philosophies of this world.” Believers must avoid “hypocrisy” by committing to be “informed patriots” who “relentlessly explore the intersection of truth and politics,” the better to serve as “ambassadors” to a “dying culture.”

Genre as the Basis for Rhetorical Community A useful framework for parsing this discourse is Miller’s (1994) theory of the rhetorical community whose social actions are grounded in genres. The latter function in the rhetorical community as a “bearer of culture . . . [that] literally incorporates knowledge—​knowledge of the aesthetics, economics, politics, religious beliefs, and all the various dimensions of what we know as human culture” (69). As social action, a genre is “situated communication that is a capable of reproduction, that can be manifested in more than one situation, more than

 



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Table 2.1  Promotional Statements for Christian Radio News Services American Family News

Salem Radio Network News USA Radio News

[Y]‌our latest news from a Christian perspective . . . [w]hether it’s a story about prayer in public schools, work-​ place restrictions on Christians, or battles for biblical truth within our denominations . . . from reporters you can trust to give the latest news with-​ out the liberal bias that characterizes so much of the “mainstream” media.1

The number one full-​ service news source for today’s conservative and Christian radio . . . SRN News breaks the ivory tower approach of the traditional networks. . . . [S]‌erving the Christian and traditional values community with full-​time correspondents. . . . Family-​ focused and credible–​ specifically created for Christian-​formatted radio stations.2

USA Radio Network is an American media company, specializing in long-​form spoken word (talk radio) and radio newscast production and distri-​bution, with a generally conservative and Christian focus.3 . . . [The news] is balanced in a world of agenda-​filled news reporting.4

https://​www.onenewsnow.com/​general/​about. http://​salemmedia.com/​srn-​pages/​srn-​news. 3 http://​usaradio.com/​about-​2. 4 http://​usaradio.com/​affiliates/​usa-​radio-​news. 1 2

one concrete space-​time” (71). Genre supplies to members of a rhetorical community “reproducible speaker and addressee roles, social typifications of recurrent social needs or exigencies, topical structures (or ‘moves’ and ‘steps’), and ways of indexing an event to material conditions, turning them into constraints or resources” (71). As such, genre sustains the rhetorical community by both reproducing it and reconciling its “centrifugal and centripetal forces” (74). Further, Miller observed, genre functions as a “transmission belt” between individual minds and the larger community so that, as in Giddens’s (1984) theory of structuration, individual agency may create communal structures, but members are simultaneously enabled and constrained as they act within and thus reproduce these structures. Elsewhere, I have demonstrated how the evangelical social system reproduces its rhetorical genres and speech codes across a macro level of evangelical institutions and their mass-​mediated representations (which disseminate communal norms), a meso level of locally public sermonic rhetoric and congregational discourses (which structure local joint deliberation and action), and a micro level of spontaneous talk and private role enactments. These studies showed how pulpit rhetoric and church lingo (Ward 2010), charismatic leadership styles (Ward

 

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Table 2.2  Opening Bumpers of American Family Radio Talk Shows Program/​Airtime*

Program Opening

Today’s Issues1 M–​F 10–​11:30 am

Announcer: Welcome to Today’s Issues, offering a Christian response to the issues of the day.

Janet Mefferd Live2 M–​F 12–​1 pm

Announcer: This is Janet Mefferd Live. Anonymous Voice Clip: My conscience is captive to the Word of God. Janet Mefferd: Will America honor the God who gave us our liberty and our rights? Or will we turn our backs on Him? Winston Churchill Clip: Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Mefferd: We have good news to share with a dying culture. Let’s do it! Anonymous Preacher Clip: We can take this country for Christ! Announcer: And now, here’s your host, Janet Mefferd, on American Family Radio.

Focal Point3 M–​F 1–​3 pm

Ronald Reagan Clip 1: Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged. Reagan Clip 2: An informed patriot is what we want. Announcer: Welcome to American Family Radio’s Focal Point, the home of muscular Christianity on conservative talk radio, where we relentlessly explore the intersection of truth and politics. Reagan Clip 3: The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant. It’s just that they know so much that isn’t so. Announcer: Now, here’s your host, Bryan Fischer.

Washington Watch4 Announcer: This is Washington Watch with Tony Perkins, M–​F 4–​5 pm powered by the Family Research Council, your embassy of faith, family, and freedom in the heart of our Nation’s Capital. Now here’s your host, FRC President Tony Perkins. (continued )

 



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Table 2.2 Continued Program/​Airtime*

Program Opening

The Hamilton Corner5 M–​F 5–​6 pm

Abraham Hamilton: Darkness is not an affirmative force. It simply reoccupies the space vacated by the light. Announcer: This is The Hamilton Corner on American Family Radio and Urban Family Talk [an AFR internet radio station]. Hamilton: It should be uncomfortable for a believer to live as a hypocrite. Announcer: Delivering people out of the bondage of mainstream media and the philosophies of this world. Hamilton: God has called you and me to be His ambassadors, even in this dark moment. Let’s not miss our moment. Announcer: And now, The Hamilton Corner.

* All airtimes are United States Central Time Zone 1 https://​afr.net/​podcasts/​todays-​issues. 2 https://​afr.net/​podcasts/​janet-​mefferd-​live. 3 https://​afr.net/​podcasts/​focal-​point. 4 http://​www.frc.org/​radio. 5 https://​afr.net/​podcasts/​the-​hamilton-​corner.

2018b), and political preferences (Ward 2018c) are structurated across macro, meso, and micro levels as media representations, Sunday sermons, and private enactments reify one another. Similarly, Bean (2014) found that “Christian radio” plays a decisive agenda-​ setting role in American evangelical churches. In her view, her study affirmed Katz and Lazarsfeld’s (1955) classic thesis that elites extend their influence by reaching local opinion leaders who, in turn, translate elite messages into local terms for local networks. Typical were a Baptist couple who “learned to connect their religious and political identities from sources outside their local congregation” as they “became an avid listener to Christian radio” and would “rely on Focus on the Family for information . . . [on] political advocacy” (Bean 2014, 135–​136). The couple claimed to appreciate “balanced” news reporting but were “not personally open to liberal arguments” and “interpreted the news as a series of liberal assaults on truth and Christianity, following the narrative [they] heard over and over on Fox News and Christian radio” (136). Because the couple framed the news as a spiritual “battle between liberal and conservative worldviews,” they “could only trust sources like [radio ministries] Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, or Concerned Women for America” (136–​ 137). The wife promoted her Christian worldview in the local congregation as a youth group leader, while the husband was known among church members

 

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for his involvement in a national “Presidential Prayer Team.” By contrast, Bean’s companion study found that, in large measure because Canada has no electronic church, members of Canadian evangelical churches shared the doctrines of their American counterparts but did not incorporate a partisan political identity into their religious identity. Thus, “American evangelicals are not bound to political conservatism by the content of their distinctive theology or moral worldview” (18), but because subcultural discourses have cast partisanship as a sacred activity and thereby delegitimized political diversity. In terms of rhetorical community as theorized by Miller (1993, 1994), the genre “Christian worldview” then functions as a bearer of culture that literally incorporates all the dimensions of American evangelical knowledge: the commitment to a “plain” common-​sense reading of the scriptures, the “scientific” rationality to derive divine laws by “reasoning” from the observed “facts” of the biblical texts, the doctrine of “inerrancy” by which the word of a God who cannot err necessarily corresponds to historic and scientific realities. Further, the genre “Christian worldview” supplies the evangelical rhetorical community with reproducible speaker and addressee roles (“credible” and “balanced” Christian newscasters and talk show hosts help listeners become “informed patriots” and “His ambassadors”), social typifications of recurrent social needs or exigencies (“battles for biblical truth” must be waged against “the philosophies of this world”), topical structures (the “darkness” of “liberal bias” and “the ivory tower” must be opposed by the “light”), and ways of indexing an event to material conditions (“restrictions on Christians” are accelerating in a “dying culture”), turning them into constraints or resources (“we can take this country for Christ” by “relentlessly exploring the intersection of truth and politics”). The ambiguity of the genre “Christian worldview” also creates a social space where the centrifugal force of American evangelicals’ divergent doctrines (whether or not charismatic gifts such as speaking in tongues and faith healing operate in the church today) and the centripetal force of their shared bibliology and soteriology (how to be “saved”) may be reconciled and the rhetorical community thus sustained.

A Day in the Life of “Christian Radio” Finally, news/​talk on evangelical radio illustrates how the genre “Christian worldview” provides a basis for social action through “situated communication that is capable of reproduction, that can be manifested in more than one situation, more than one concrete space-​time” (Miller 1994, 71). The genre’s broad reproducibility gives evangelical media presenters license in their news judgments to “credibly” report news that may seem tenuously connected to

 



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legitimate religious concerns and even “problematic  .  .  .  when, as is often the case, religious radio talk show hosts address economic interests and thereby align themselves with political views dominated by self-​interested materialism” (Sumser 2016, 107). Thus, opposition to abortion, marriage equality, and permissive sexual mores may be supported by direct citations from the Bible. But where Christians might be expected to oppose violence and poverty, evangelical news/​talk programmers instead oppose gun control and federal welfare spending because the “Christian worldview” also encompasses claims that America is a “Christian nation” (Connable 2016) whose liberties are ultimately secured by a vigilant citizenry and whose prosperity owes to its self-​reliant “Protestant work ethic” (Martin 2016). The evangelical emphasis on individual religious experience, then, migrates naturally to individualistic stances toward the defense of property rights and the pursuit of economic advancement. To demonstrate how the genre “Christian worldview” enables and constrains social action within the evangelical rhetorical community through “situated communication that is capable of reproduction,” consider a “day in the life” of the electronic church and its news/​talk programming. Table 2.3 compares stories reported Monday, January 8, 2018, by the mainstream television network evening newscasts and the major evangelical networks’ top-​of-​the-​hour radio news services. The mainstream networks’ reportage for January 8, 2018, centered on several major stories: speculation that Oprah Winfrey might run for president in 2020, historic talks between North and South Korea, the Special Counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, severe winter storms across the country, dangerous flooding and threatened mudslides in California, the nationwide flu epidemic, and the fatal shooting of a Colorado law officer. By contrast, and consistent with a “Christian worldview,” reportage from the evangelical radio networks—​distributed to a claimed total of 2,800 affiliates combined—​emanated from a rhetorical community where the main concerns of the day were abortion, immigration, liberal educators, liberal media, big government, and gun rights and invasive technologies, and where president Donald Trump, as the “anti-​Obama” and “anti-​Hillary,” symbolized conservative social and economic values. A further hallmark of evangelical reportage was quoting only friendly sources. In its January 8, 2018, lead story, for example, USA Radio News (2018) reported: [Miller:] “That the author is a garbage author of a garbage book.” A top aide to President Trump speaks out about the book Fire and Fury which questions President Trump’s mental abilities. White House Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller telling CNN’s State of the Union: “The president is a political genius who won against a field of 17 incredibly

CBS Evening News1

Oprah 2020 Fire and Fury book JFK airport flooding Korea talks California flooding Trump Tower fire Romney treated for prostate cancer Flu season Queen Elizabeth reflects on her coronation

ABC World News Tonight1

Oprah 2020 Killer of Colorado deputy sought Korea talks Flu season Mueller to request Trump interview Winter weather California flooding

Oprah 2020 Initial talks about Trump interview with Mueller Smartphone use by children Video of Colorado deputy shooting Winter weather Korea talks 2018 Consumer Electronics Show Internet scams

NBC Nightly News1 Supreme Court leaves in place Mississippi law on freedom of conscience Illinois school board member challenges liberal curriculum Christian legal group sues over tax-​funded abortions in Illinois Muslim congressman backs domestic terror group Professor’s final exam says Trump racist Professor’s lecture says Zionists are terrorists

American Family News2

Table 2.3  Stories Reported on Selected Newscasts for January 8, 2018

DACA at issue in talks over government funding Trump lauds tax reform at famers convention FCC chair cancels major speech at Consumer Electronics Show due to threats Consumer borrowing rise shows confidence in economy Parents group says network execs like “smutty television”

Salem Radio Network3

Top aide calls Wolff book trash, lauds Trump Haley clarifies Trump on North Korea Golden Globes talk of sexual harassment Trump to speak at Farm Bureau Cold weather Nationwide health club pulls cable news from TVs in gyms SpaceX rocket launch Republicans discuss 2018 agenda GOP lawmaker says rural Americans want small government

USA Radio News4

 

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1

Retrieved January 8, 2018, from Roku channels of ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News. Accessed January 8, 2018. https://​www.onenewsnow.com. 3 Accessed January 8, 2018. https://​www.srnnews.com. 4 Accessed January 8, 2018. http://​usaradio.com/​usa-​radio-​news.

Taxpayer group faults Gynecologist group remaining Obamsays women should acare regulations be allowed to carry Islamic immigration to out own abortions Germany linked to Traditional departviolent crime rise ment stores learning Pro-​life advocates fight to compete against uphill in California internet retailers Investors urge Apple to fight iPhone addiction in children

CNN’s Tapper spars on air with Trump aide; Trump tweets NBC faces backlash for tweet calling Oprah “future president” Ron Paul on CNN says Sessions won’t win on marijuana ban Interior Department voids Obama ban on oil drilling Fall in gun background checks means end of “Obama gun boom”

 

 

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talented people, who took down the Bush dynasty, who took down the Clinton dynasty, who took down the entire media complex.” Salem Radio Network News (2018) that day followed a similar practice in the lead story for the “Christian interest” portion of its newscast when the network reported: A leading decency advocate says the reason we have so much “smutty television” is because the networks like it. “It’s not only these [inaudible] producers go across America and do sampling to see what the nation wants. They produce what they like. And what they like is what makes them laugh or makes them entertained.” But Tim Winter of the Parents Television Council said America clearly wants something else. “The television series that continue on year after year, decade after decade, and reruns are primarily shows that are actually family-​friendly.” PTC rates TV shows and movies at parentstv.org. Of the three evangelical radio news services and their January 8, 2018, top-​of-​ the-​hour newscasts, American Family News (AFN) Network (2018) made the least pretense of journalistic balance, following its mandate (as shown in Table 2.1) to bring “your latest news from a Christian perspective . . . from reporters you can trust to give the latest news without the liberal bias that characterizes so much of the ‘mainstream’ media.” In reporting that the US Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to a Mississippi “freedom of conscience” law that, among other things, permits businesses to deny services for gay weddings, AFN quoted its own general counsel and a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom. In reporting that a local Illinois school board member questioned an “anti-​religious” curriculum on global citizenship, AFN quoted a spokesperson for the Illinois Family Institute. In reporting that Congressman Keith Ellison, a Muslim, had endorsed the book Antifa: An Anti-​Fascist Handbook, AFN quoted a spokesperson for the right-​wing Young America’s Foundation. In two stories reporting the “leftist” and “anti-​Semitic” activities of two California university professors, AFN respectively quoted spokespersons for the conservative student group Campus Reform and the pro-​Israel group Stand with Us. In a report on Obamacare, AFR quoted a spokesperson for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. And in reporting a “pro-​abortion” bill in the California Senate, AFR quoted a spokesperson for Californians for Life. Excerpted quotations from these and other January 8, 2018, stories reported by AFN are shown in Table 2.4. Evangelical radio for January 8, 2018, was also rife with talk shows, both network produced and syndicated, that tackled current events “from a Christian

 



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Table 2.4  Excerpts from American Family News Stories for January 8, 2018 Story Headline

Spokesperson Quoted

Quotation Excerpt

SCOTUS: 5th Circuit got it right on “religious freedom law”

Alliance Defending Freedom

“[T]‌here really is no constitutional crisis when a state like Mississippi decides to protect the religious convictions and moral convictions of people who believe in marriage between one man and one woman.”

School board mom calls out controversial assignment

Illinois Family Institute

“The central problem was theological errors taught to children as facts.” [She] tells OneNewsNow that “progressives” control many public schools because Evangelicals are reluctant to take action, leaving the schools and classrooms in control of liberals who are passionate about their beliefs.

Left leader promoting irresponsible, foolhardy ideals

Young America’s Foundation

“This book that he [Rep. Keith Ellison] posed with [in a photo posted to his Twitter account] emphasizes suppressing the First Amendment rights of those you disagree with, emphasizes the use of violence to obtain an ends to their means, and it really is concerning that someone who is moving up on the left in America would think that those sorts of tactics are acceptable to promote.”

College course final depicts Trump as hater, Hillary as unifier

Campus Reform

According to the conservative college publication Campus Reform, little effort was made by the course’s professor . . . to hide her leftist leaning.

USC OK with prof ’s anti-​Semitic presentation?

Stand with Us

“A professor can say a lot of things, including this, but [whether professors] should be held responsible for what they say is the question. And we feel he should be.” (continued )

 

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Table 2.4 Continued Story Headline

Spokesperson Quoted

Quotation Excerpt

Revise insurance rules and watch premiums “skyrocket”

Texas Public Policy Foundation

“[I]‌nstead of repealing those [regulations], they’re reaching into our wallets, taking our tax dollars, and then handing them to big insurance companies to continue propping up Obama-​care.”

Rubin: It’s a terrible situation in Europe

Former mayor of Israeli city

“In the Islamic world, women are . . . sexually abused, physically abused, and emotionally abused, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that you suddenly let these young single males out of a box and think they’re not going to go into a country like Germany, where it’s a very liberal society, and they’re not going to go crazy. This is part of their culture, that women are their play things.”

Voice for life “very much Californians for a minority” in California Life

“The voice for life is in a very much minority, and so while we will reemphasize that fact—​that the chemical abortion pill ends a human life—​we will also talk about the horrific, traumatic impact that the chemical abortion experience has on women.”

Source: Headlines and story texts retrieved January 8, 2018, from https://​www.onnewsnow.com.

perspective.” Table 2.5 summarizes what listeners may have heard that day over the airwaves or on demand via streaming media.

Crossovers Between Christian and Conservative Media This “day in the life” of evangelical news/​talk further suggests that the Trump era has spawned a growing confluence of interests between the electronic

 



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Table 2.5  Talk Shows Aired January 8, 2018, on Evangelical Radio Talk Show

Topics

American Family Radio The Hamilton Corner1

Segment 1: The infallible and immutable Word of God is not an opinion. Segment 2: People laughed when Trump suggested he might pick Oprah for V.P. Now they want her as president. Oprah preaches The Secret, a book which the author admits was inspired by a demon guide. Segment 3: Oprah calls herself a “Messenger” but her message is a direct attack on Christ and denies sin.

Janet Mefferd Live2 Is This the Evangelical Deep State? [Discussion of “liberals” within the evangelical movement] Sandy Rios in the Morning3

Segment 1: President Trump’s Accomplishments Segment 2: AG Sessions Is Working Behind the Scenes Segment 3: Fire and Fury Book Credibility

Today’s Issues4

Segment 1: Tim, Walker, and Ed talk with Gov. Bryant (R-​MS) on HB 1523 and [AFN reporter] Steve Jordahl weighs in on it as well as discusses the president’s 2018 agenda and other news headlines. Segment 2: Tim, Walker, and Ed talk with Fred Jackson on top news headlines of the day including an update in MS HB1523 and [American Family Association general counsel] Abe Hamilton weighs in on the topic as well. They also discuss the possibility of an Oprah 2020 run and the liberal media vs. President Trump.

USA Radio Network* Daybreak USA5

Is Steve Bannon Really Sorry for Those Comments He Made about Trump’s Family?

Wayne Allyn Root Show6

Segment 1: Wayne Says, “Oprah’s Bluffing; She’s Not Running” Segment 2: Bannon Thought He Was Bigger Than Trump Segment 3: Wayne Talks to Guest Cliven Bundy, Who’s Now a Free Man!

Syndicated Programs FamilyLife Today7

Author Lacey Buchanan, a wife and mother of two, talks about the birth of her first son, Christian, who was born with severe facial deformities. Buchanan shares how the faith of her and her husband has helped them through the difficulties and allowed them to see the beauty of their young son’s life. (continued )

 

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Table 2.5 Continued Talk Show

Topics

Family Talk8

The Bible says in Romans that God’s invisible qualities and divine nature are so clearly seen in creation that we are left without an excuse but to praise Him. On this edition of Family Talk, Dr. Dobson will sit down with author David Rives to consider the science behind biblical creation and why the next generation needs to be more informed about this topic.

Focus on the Family9

Popular finance expert and best-​selling author [and syndicated radio talk show host] Dave Ramsey offers parents practical help on teaching young children how to handle money wisely, establishing a solid foundation for doing so when they become adults. Dave covers topics including teaching kids how to earn and save money, the importance of giving, and much more.

Jay Sekulow Live10

A Dramatic Shift in US Policy Towards Iran. This and more.

Point of View

During the first hour Kerby will host with guest Randy Newman from Connection Points. They’ll answer questions like, “How did Jesus evangelize? What’s the best way for us to tell others about him?” In the second hour Kerby has open lines today.

11

Wallbuilders Live!12 Leadership is essential for us to turn the nation around. Frankly, we’ve got to reach the next generation and raise them up to really understand what it means to be an American and what it means to have a biblical, constitutional, and historical perspective. Millennials are not born biased. That’s why we need to be able to reach them and to share truth, biblical morals, and foundational principles ensuring that they are not just getting a one-​ sided biased perspective from their universities and the media. Special guest Jonathan Richie shares his great experience with the Wall Builders Leadership Training Program. Learn about the upcoming programs for this year and how you can help or get involved. Join us today as we discuss why it is vital that we help train our young people to change and shape the culture for good.

 



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Table 2.5 Continued Talk Show

Topics

Washington Watch13

On Monday’s edition of Washington Watch with Tony Perkins, Washington Watch producer Russ Jones guest hosts for Tony. President of Citizens United, former deputy campaign manager for the Trump campaign, [and] New York Times best-​selling author of Let Trump Be Trump, David Bossie joins Russ to discuss last night’s Golden Globe awards and various actors’ protests of President Trump. Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry is here to discuss a new guidance document, coauthored with Rep. Mike Johnson (R-​La.), which provides guidance on religious expression in public schools. Also, ADF [Alliance Defending Freedom] Senior Counsel and Vice President of the Center for Life Kevin Theriot joins Russ to highlight a religious liberty win from the Supreme Court.

* USA Radio talk shows are distributed to both Christian-​market and general-​market radio stations. 1 https://​afr.net/​podcasts/​the-​hamilton-​corner/​2018/​january/​ oprah-​preaches-​the-​secret-​a-​book-​which-​the-​author-​admits-​was-​inspired-​by-​a-​demon-​guide. 2 https://​afr.net/​podcasts/​janet-​mefferd-​live/​2018/​january/​is-​this-​the-​evangelical-​deep-​state. 3 https://​afr.net/​podcasts/​sandy-​rios-​in-​the-​morning/​2018/​january/​president-​trumps-​ accomplishments-​ag-​sessions-​is-​working-​behind-​the-​scenes-​and-​fire-​and-​fury-​book-​credibility/​. 4 https://​afr.net/​podcasts/​todays-​issues/​2018/​january/​gov-​bryant-​on-​hb1523-​and-​potus-​ 2018-​agenda; andhttps://​afr.net/​podcasts/​todays-​issues/​2018/​january/​scotus-​and-​ms-​hb1523-​ oprah-​2020-​liberal-​media-​vs-​potus/​. 5 https://​www.spreaker.com/​show/​daybreak-​usa. 6 https://​www.spreaker.com/​show/​the-​wayne-​allyn-​root-​show. 7 http://​familylifetoday.com/​program/​seeing-​with-​eyes-​of-​faith/​?autoPlay=y. 8 http://​www.drjamesdobson.org/​Broadcasts/​ Broadcast?i=d4c78767-​a08c-​4a61-​838f-​363bcf42db18. 9 https://​www.focusonthefamily.com/​media/​daily-​broadcast/​ equipping-​your-​kids-​to-​handle-​money-​pt1. 10 https://​aclj.org/​middle-​east/​a-​dramatic-​shift-​in-​us-​policy-​towards-​iran. 11 https://​pointofview.net/​show/​monday-​january-​8-​2018/​. 12 https://​wallbuilderslive.com/​jonathan-​richie-​leadership-​training/​. 13 http://​www.frc.org/​wwlivewithtonyperkins/​david-​bossie-​jeff-​landry-​kevin-​theriot.

church and the conservative media establishment. A Politico Magazine report, for example, found that since 2016 Trump had given eleven interviews to the Christian Broadcasting Network, and since becoming president given more interviews to CBN than to CNN, ABC, or CBS. “Never mind Fox,” the report concluded, “Trump’s most reliable media mouthpiece is now Christian TV” (Graham 2018). In the fall of 2017, former presidential candidate and Fox News

 

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talker Mike Huckabee debuted on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. As the top-​rated religious TV network’s first-​ever show on politics, Huckabee immediately became its most-​watched program and boasts more than a million weekly viewers. Meanwhile, televangelist Paula White is a Trump spiritual adviser and Christian radio talker Jay Sekulow is one of the president’s personal lawyers. American Family Radio’s hourly newscasts frequently include Fox News feeds and the network airs a daily commentary by Fox News Radio talker Todd Starnes. Yet radio’s Salem Media Group outpaces all other organs of the electronic church, television or radio, in crossing over into the conservative media establishment. Starting in the 1970s with a few religious radio stations in North Carolina and California, Salem grew incrementally after its 1986 incorporation and in the 1990s branched into contemporary Christian music radio. Then in 1999, three years after Congress eliminated the national cap on how many stations a broadcaster could own, Salem went public to raise capital for acquisitions. Since then, Salem has become a media conglomerate that not only dominates commercial spoken-​word evangelical radio but also operates three radio music programming services and acquired the top fan magazines for the contemporary Christian and southern gospel music genres. In print media, Salem publishes professional magazines for pastors and youth workers, plus popular magazines for evangelical book fans, and provides self-​publishing services for faith-​based authors. Pastors can download sermon preparation materials from Salem plus graphics and videos to supplement their messages, while worship leaders can download song tracks and worship visuals, and youth workers can access video lessons for children. Salem search engines help users find local evangelical churches, schools, and bookstores, and apply for church and missionary jobs. The faithful can also improve their lives through Salem’s line of wellness products and its monthly financial investment newsletters and weekly trading services. Thus, with total annual revenues of more than $275 million, Salem Media Group (2017) has become a de facto “denomination” for evangelicals, providing the kinds of resources that mainline Protestants seek from their own national denominations. Yet Salem’s parallel move into the conservative media establishment has also made it a behind-​the-​scenes powerhouse of right-​wing politics. Its portfolio includes not only Christian radio outlets but also conservative news/​talk stations in thirty-​three major cities (Salem Media Group 2018c). Two of its seven general-​market conservative talk shows, The Mike Gallagher Show (7  million weekly listeners) and The Hugh Hewitt Show (6.5  million), rank among the nation’s top ten talkers by audience (Talkers 2018). That Salem’s conservative news/​talk takes a pro-​Trump slant is evident from topics addressed on January 8, 2018, by the network’s seven talkers and shown in Table 2.6.

 



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Table 2.6  T  alk Shows Aired January 8, 2018, on Salem Conservative News/​ Talk Radio The Dennis Prager Show1

Segment 1: If you’re a Trump hater, Michael Wolff ’s new gossip book is just want you wanted to hear; but if you’re interested in the truth, you should be very skeptical. . . . California has already seceded from the Union. All they have to do is make it official. Segment 2: The Golden Globes took place last night. No one seemed to care about the awards. It was the politics that mattered. . . . Dennis talks to Naomi Riley, columnist for the New York Post. Her new book is Be the Parent, Please: Stop Banning Seesaws and Start Banning Snapchat: Strategies for Solving the Real Parenting Problems. Segment 3: NYT White House reporter says that Michael Wolff has a notional idea of the truth. What is that? . . . Jews are increasingly threatened in Germany—​by Muslims. . . . Dennis talks to Michael Walsh, novelist, screenwriter, and columnist for American Greatness and PJ Media.

The Eric Metaxas Show2

Segment 1: It’s Miracle Monday again and Ken Fish stops by the studio to share more inspiring stories of the loving God who continues to work wonders throughout our world. Segment 2: Eric meets his match when Pastor [and syndicated radio preacher] Erwin Lutzer bats around ideas from his recent book, Rescuing the Gospel: The Story and Significance of the Reformation.

The Hugh Hewitt Show3

Segment 1: Hugh covers the news of the morning with audio clips and talks with Mike Allen, Axios.com founder and executive editor, and Salena Zito, CNN contributor and New York Post columnist. Segment 2: Hugh covers the news of the morning with audio clips and takes calls. Segment 3: Hugh discusses the news of the morning with Sonny Perdue, US Secretary of Agriculture; James Hohmann, Washington Post Daily 202 writer; and Josh Kraushaar, politics editor at National Journal. (continued )

 

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Table 2.6 Continued The Joe Walsh Show4

The Democrats want amnesty for DACA kids, and a lot of Republicans want the same thing. Trump insists that won’t happen without a wall on the southern border. Oprah Winfrey accepted an award at the Golden Globes, and now she’s the leading contender for the Democratic nomination to run against Trump in 2020. NBC (accidentally) sent out an approving tweet for Oprah in 2020, then deleted it. Good Trump: POTUS ended the temporary protected status (TPS) program for more than 200,000 Salvadorans. CNN’s media man doesn’t have a clue about truth or standards. Bad Trump: Responding to Fire and Fury chaos, Trump goes over the top, claims to be a genius.

The Larry Elder Show5

Segment 1: Stephen Miller squares off against Jake Tapper on CNN. Larry thinks Miller is the clear victor. Segment 2: Larry reviews the Golden Globes. They attacked Trump less than expected, but what were the main themes? And Oprah is now being taken seriously as a presidential candidate? Segment 3: Larry covers the Golden Globes’ constant tirade against sexual harassment and men. Did they go overboard?

The Michael Medved Show6

Focus on State of the Union, Not President’s State of Mind

The Mike Gallagher Host Mike Gallagher and Congressman Mike Gallagher delve Show7 into the subject of present US military preparedness. http://​www.dennisprager.com/​show-​archive/​page/​2/​. https://​www.omnycontent.com/​d/​playlist/​5e27a451-​e6e6-​4c51-​aa03-​a7370003783c/​ 5ed623bc-​6ca2-​41d2-​9fa4-​a8400005a5b9/​c11e6adb-​dc0d-​4481-​9da8-​a8400005a5c3/​podcast.rss. 3 https://​www.hughniverse.com/​radio-​show/​page/​4/​. 4 https://​omny.fm/​shows/​the-​joe-​walsh-​show/​the-​joe-​walsh-​program-​january-​8-​2018?utm_​ source=feedburner&utm_​medium=feed&utm_​campaign=Feed%3A+JoeWalshShow+%28The+Jo e+Walsh+Show+Podcast%29. 5 http://​www.larryelder.com/​show-​archive. 6 http://​www.michaelmedved.com/​column/​ focus-​on-​the-​state-​of-​the-​union-​not-​the-​presidents-​state-​of-​mind. 7 http://​www.mikeonline.com/​ rep-​gallagher-​repgallagher-​discusses-​steve-​bannon-​north-​korea-​and-​border-​security. 1 2

Beyond radio, Salem in 2014 acquired Regnery Publishing, the leading publisher of conservative books, as well as the Conservative Book Club. On the web, Salem acquired the venerable conservative newspaper Human Events and converted it into the internet magazine. The rag is now part of Townhall

 



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Media, acquired by Salem in 2006. The division operates the Townhall web community, which attracts two million unique monthly visitors and features video content from Fox News, and publishes the leading conservative news and commentary blogs, RedState and HotAir. Meanwhile, Townhall Commentary is heard over seventy Salem radio stations and boasts more than one million daily listeners, and the Townhall Review weekend news magazine is aired over ninety stations and attracts two hundred thousand weekly listeners (Salem Media Group  2018d). Salem cosponsored four of the 2015–​2-​ 16 Republican presidential debates and Hewitt was among the moderators. During the general election, according to internal emails obtained in 2018 by CNN, Salem corporate executives encouraged its radio hosts to favorably cover the candidacy of Donald Trump (Gold and Darcy 2018). More recently, former RedState writers alleged they were purged in a 2018 mass firing for not being sufficiently pro-​Trump. RedState’s Erick Ericson, who left the blog in 2015, commented that the move was “not really surprising given Salem’s [pro-​ Trump] direction” (Stelter 2018).

Conclusions What emerges from the foregoing picture of the evangelical news/​talk genre affirms Bean’s (2014) observation that Christian Right elites in the United States—​who reach the faithful on a daily basis principally via radio—​influence laypeople at the individual (micro) and congregational (meso) levels by framing a conservative political identity as a religious practice that flows from the rhetorical community’s “Christian worldview.” Of a typical churchgoing interviewee, Bean noted: [H]‌e did not think of this [Christian Right involvement] as a “political” act. From his perspective, he was engaging in a religious practice, but one that deepened the organic connection between evangelical identity and conservative politics. This was a larger pattern in [the] American churches:  laypeople engaged with parachurch groups to deepen their religious practice, not achieve preexisting “political” goals. . . . Groups like Focus on the Family were trustworthy sources of political news precisely because they were a “ministry,” independent of the dirty world of “politics.” . . . Laypeople viewed Christian Right parachurch groups as providers of religious services: resources to develop one’s prayer life, parenting, and relationship advice, materials for personal Bible study, and sources of “reliable” Christian news. (139)

 

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The present study affirms this observation from the opposite end by elaborating the macro level of evangelical institutions and the media representations they disseminate daily to the faithful. Further, this study highlights the rhetorical resources that are marshaled, through the genre “Christian worldview,” to sustain evangelicals as a rhetorical community. This genre operates in evangelical news/​talk programming as warrants for portraying, as “Christian,” a politically conservative slant to what stories are selected (Table 2.3), what “expert” sources are quoted (Table 2.4), and what topics Christians should be thinking about (Table 2.5). Thus, on a typical news day, coverage of abortion, immigration, liberal educators, liberal media, big government, and gun rights take priority over historic talks between North and South Korea, killer storms across the country, and a nationwide flu epidemic. The experts that radio listeners can trust are spokespersons for the Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Family Association, the Illinois Family Institute, and Californians for Life. The topics Christians need to think about are Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of a “demonic” book, “liberal” infiltration of the evangelical movement, laws protecting “religious liberty,” and “false” attacks on President Donald Trump. Nor should observers of this conservative religious media establishment ignore the spiritual dimension with which evangelicals invest its rhetoric. Stephens and Giberson (2011) demonstrated how evangelical leaders are trusted above conventionally credentialed experts because the faithful see these leaders as “anointed” to speak for God through a “process by which God sends his spirit in a special way to a person, empowering that person to speak and lead other Christians” (8). Thus: In the realm of ideas debated in the public square, high-​profile, media-​ savvy evangelical “experts” rally millions of believers to common causes by carefully donning mantles of great authority. Such leaders promote elaborate and well-​articulated worldviews that often run counter to contemporary scholarship. . . . Evangelicals who turn to such authorities believe that any expert must first and foremost have an unquestioning belief in the literal truth of the Bible. (5–​6) Among evangelicals, Stephens and Giberson (2011) observed, “Anointing, though it brings great authority, is typically unrelated to intellectual ability.” For that reason, “A winsome preacher who can quote the Bible . . . may possess more authority on global warming for believers than an informed climatologist” (8). The rhetorical glue that holds it all together—​that functions as a bearer of culture, that is capable of reproduction as needed, that supplies “reproducible speaker and addressee roles, social typifications of recurrent social needs or

 



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exigencies,” that furnishes “topical structures . . . and ways of indexing an event to material conditions, turning them into constraints or resources” (Miller 1994, 71), that reproduces similarities and reconciles differences, that connects the individual and the communal—​is the claim by evangelical media presenters and their audiences to enact a “Christian worldview” by addressing the concerns of the day “from a Christian perspective.”

References Abelman, Robert. 2006. “Without Divine Intervention:  Contemporary Christian Music Radio and Audience Transference.” Journal of Media and Religion 5 (4): 209–​231. American Center for Law and Justice. 2018. “About Jay Sekulow.” Accessed January 25, 2018. https://​aclj.org/​jay-​sekulow. American Family News Network. 2018. “About.” Accessed January 25, 2018. https://​www.onenewsnow.com/​general/​about. American Family Radio. 2018. “Find Your Local Station.” Accessed June 5, 2018. https://​afr.net/​ station-​finder. Apostolidis, Paul. 2000. Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Balmer, Randall. 2010. The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Barna Group. 2005. “More People Use Christian Media Than Attend Church.” Accessed January 25, 2018. https://​www.barna.com/​research/​more-​people-​use-​christian-​media-​than-​attend-​ church/​. Bean, Lydia. 2014. The Politics of Evangelical Identity: Local Churches and Partisan Divides in the United States and Canada. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brooks, Richard T. 2003. “The ‘Canadian Electronic Church’: The Development of Single-​Faith Broadcasting in Canada.” M.A. thesis, McMaster University. Christian Broadcasting Network. 2018. “Pat Robertson.” Accessed January 25, 2018. http://​ www1.cbn.com/​700club/​pat-​robertson. Connable, Sean. 2016. “The ‘Christian Nation’ Thesis and the Evangelical Echo Chamber.” In The Electronic Church in the Digital Age: Cultural Impacts of Evangelical Mass Media, Vol. 2, edited by Mark Ward Sr., 183–​203. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. DiCola, Peter, and Kristin Thomson. 2002. Radio Deregulation:  Has It Served Citizens and Musicians? Washington, DC: Future of Music Coalition. Drushel, Bruce E. 1998. “The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and Radio Market Structure.” Journal of Media Economics 11 (3): 3–​20. Education Media Foundation. 2018. “Education Media Foundation.” Accessed June 5, 2018. https://​www.emfbroadcasting.com. Family Research Council. 2018. “Station Listing: Live with Tony Perkins.” Accessed January 25, 2018. http://​www.frc.org/​live-​with-​tony-​perkins-​station-​listings. Finke, Roger, and Rodney Stark. 2005. The Churching of America, 1776–​2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Focus on the Family. 2018. “Focus on the Family Broadcast.” Accessed January 25, 2018. https://​ www.focusonthefamily.com/​media/​daily-​broadcast. Fratrik, Mark. 2002. Radio Transactions 2001:  Where Did All the Deals Go? Chantilly, VA: BIA Financial Networks. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society:  Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.

 

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Gold, Hadas, and Oliver Darcy. 2018. “Salem Executives Pressured Radio Hosts to Cover Trump More Positively, Emails Show.” CNN Money, May 9. Accessed June 5, 2018. http://​money. cnn.com/​2018/​05/​09/​media/​salem-​radio-​executives-​trump/​index.html. Graham, Ruth. 2018. “The Church of The Donald:  Never Mind Fox, Trump’s Most Reliable Media Mouthpiece Is Now Christian TV.” Politico Magazine, May/​June. Accessed June 5, 2018. https://​www.politico.com/​magazine/​story/​2018/​04/​22/​ trump-​christian-​evangelical-​conservatives-​television-​tbn-​cbn-​218008. Hadden, Jeffrey K. 1993. “The Rise and Fall of American Televangelism.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 527 (1): 113–​130. Hangen, Tona J. 2002. Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hankins, Barry. 2008. Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hendershot, Heather. 2004. Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hendershot, Heather. 2011. What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-​Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Katz, Elihu, and Paul Felix Lazarsfeld. 1955. Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Kintz, Linda, and Julia Lesage, eds. 1998. Media, Culture, and the Religious Right. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marsden, George M. 1980. Fundamentalism and American Culture:  The Shaping of Twentieth-​ Century Evangelicalism, 1870–​1925. New York: Oxford University Press. Martin, Stephanie A. 2016. “Money and the Electronic Church: Decoding Dave Ramsey’s Debt-​ Free Gospel.” In The Electronic Church in the Digital Age: Cultural Impacts of Evangelical Mass Media, Vol. 2, edited by Mark Ward Sr., 57–​78. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Melton, J. Gordon, Phillip Charles Lucas, and Jon R. Stone. 1997. Prime-​time Religion:  An Encyclopedia of Religious Broadcasting. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx. Miller, Carolyn R. 1993. “The Polis as Rhetorical Community.” Rhetorica 11 (3): 211–​240. Miller, Carolyn R. 1994. “Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre.” In Genre in the New Rhetoric, edited by Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway, 67–​78. New  York:  Taylor & Francis. Mort, Sébastien. 2010. “Tailoring Dissent on the Airwaves: The Role of Conservative Talk Radio in the Right-​Wing Resurgence of 2010.” New Political Science 34 (4): 485–​505. Noll, Mark A. 1994. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Pew Research Center. 2015. America’s Changing Religious Landscape. Washington, DC:  Pew Research Center. Putnam, Robert D., and David E. Campbell. 2010. American Grace:  How Religion Divides and Unites Use. New York: Simon & Schuster. Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. Federal Communications Commission. 1969. 395 U.S. 367. Salem Media Group. 2017. “December 31, 2016, Annual Report on Form 10-​K .” Accessed June 5, 2018. http://​investor.salemmedia.com/​sites/​salemmedia.investorhq.businesswire.com/​ files/​doc_​l ibrary/​f ile/​SALM_​Salem_​Media_​Group_​Inc._​A nnual_​report_​w ith_​a_​ comprehensive_​overview_​of_​the_​company_​10-​K_​2017-​03-​10_​1_​1.pdf. Salem Media Group. 2018a. “SRN News.” Accessed January 25, 2018. http://​salemmedia.com/​ srn-​pages/​srn-​news. Salem Media Group. 2018b. “Station Formats.” Accessed June 5, 2018. http://​salemmedia.com/​ radio-​main-​page/​radio-​stations. Salem Media Group. 2018c. “Conservative News/​Talk.” Accessed June 5, 2018. http://​salemmedia.com/​stationcat/​newstalk. Salem Media Group. 2018d. “Townhall and HotAir.” Accessed June 5, 2018. http://​salemmedia. com/​our-​businesses/​conservative-​websites/​townhall-​and-​hotair.

 



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Salem Radio Network News. 2018. “SRN News.” Accessed January 8, 2018. https://​www.srnnews.com. Salem Web Network. 2018. “Further Your Reach.” Accessed June 5, 2018. https://​www.salemwebnetwork.com. Smith, Christian. 2011. The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos. Steiner, Mark Allan. 2016. “A Research Agenda for the Electronic Church in the Digital Age.” In The Electronic Church in the Digital Age: Cultural Impacts of Evangelical Mass Media, Vol. 1, edited by Mark Ward Sr., 1–​23. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Stelter, Brian. 2018. “‘Mass Firing’ at Conservative Site RedState.” CNN Money, April 27. Accessed June 5, 2018. http://​money.cnn.com/​2018/​04/​27/​media/​redstate-​blog-​salem-​media/​ index.html?iid=EL. Stephens, Randall J., and Karl W. Giberson. 2011. The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Sterling, Christopher H. 2004. “The Telecommunications Act of 1996.” In Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Radio, Vol. 3, edited by Christopher H. Sterling, 1382–​1384. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. Sumser, John. 2016. “Conservative Talk Radio, Religious Style:  When You Need Some Moral Outrage.” In The Electronic Church in the Digital Age:  Cultural Impacts of Evangelical Mass Media, Vol. 2, edited by Mark Ward Sr., 105–​129. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Talkers. 2018. “Top Talk Audiences [May  2018].” Accessed June 5, 2018. http://​www.talkers. com/​top-​talk-​audiences. Trinity United Methodist Church, South, v. Federal Radio Commission. 1932. No. 5661, 62 F.2d 850. USA Radio. 2018. “USA Radio—​About.” Accessed January 25, 2018. http://​usaradio.com/​ about-​2. USA Radio News. 2018. “Most Recent Show.” Accessed January 8, 2018. http://​usaradio.com/​ usa-​radio-​news. Ward, Mark, Sr. 1994. Air of Salvation: The Story of Christian Broadcasting. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. Ward, Mark, Sr. 2009. “Dark Preachers:  The Impact of Radio Consolidation on Independent Religious Syndicators.” Journal of Media and Religion 8 (2): 79–​96. Ward, Mark, Sr. 2010. “‘I Was Saved at an Early Age’: An Ethnography of Fundamentalist Speech and Cultural Performance.” Journal of Communication and Religion 33 (1): 108–​144. Ward, Mark, Sr. 2012. “Consolidating the Gospel: The Impact of the 1996 Telecommunications Act on Religious Radio Ownership.” Journal of Media and Religion 11 (1): 11–​30. Ward, Mark, Sr. 2013. “Air of the King:  Evangelicals and Radio.” In Evangelicals Christians and Popular Culture: Pop Goes the Gospel, Vol. 1, edited by Robert H. Woods Jr., 101–​118. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Ward, Mark, Sr. 2016. “Major Networks and Personalities.” In The Electronic Church in the Digital Age: Cultural Impacts of Evangelical Mass Media, Vol. 1, edited by Mark Ward Sr., 255–​284. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Ward, Mark, Sr. 2017. The Lord’s Radio: Gospel Music Broadcasting the Making of Evangelical Culture, 1920–​1960. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Ward, Mark, Sr. 2018a. “Digital Religion and Media Economics: Concentration and Convergence in the Electronic Church.” Journal of Religion, Media, and Digital Culture 7 (1): 90–​120. Ward, Mark, Sr. 2018b. “Television Transcendent:  How the Electronic Church Constructs Charismatic Leadership as a Norm of American Religious Life.” In Leadership Through the Lens: Interrogating Production, Presentation, and Power, edited by Creshema R. Murray, 133–​ 149. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Ward, Mark, Sr. 2018c. “The Dangers of Getting What You Wished For:  What Do You Say to Evangelicals?” In Constructing Narratives in Response to Trump’s Election:  How Various Populations Make Sense of an Unexpected Victory, edited by Shing-​Ling S. Chen, Nicole Allaire, and Zhoujun Joyce Chen, 61–​81. Lanham, MD: Lexington.

 

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Wilhelm, Ian. 2005. “Religious Radio: Spread the Word.” Chronicle of Philanthropy, January 6: 15. Williams, George, and Scott Roberts. 2002. “Radio Industry Review 2002: Trends in Ownership, Format, and Finance.” Media Ownership Working Group Paper #11. Washington, DC: Federal Communications Commission. Worthen, Molly. 2013. Apostles of Reason:  The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Wrench, Jason S. 2016. “Setting the Evangelical Agenda: The Role of ‘Christian Radio.’” In The Electronic Church in the Digital Age: Cultural Impacts of Evangelical Mass Media, Vol. 1, edited by Mark Ward Sr., 173–​192. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

 

3

Containing “Country Music Marxism” How Fox News Conservatized John Rich’s “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” Reece Peck Political experience is styled.

—​Robert Hariman, 1995

Steel guitars may have not made Nixon’s heart soar but building political majorities did. —​Jefferson Cowie, 2010

“Do you feel it, the electricity?” Jon Stewart asks the ecstatic live audience of The Daily Show. “Tomorrow at noon Barack Obama becomes the 44th president of the United States!” The focus of this January 19, 2009, episode is President Obama’s star-​studded inaugural concert. Taking a jab at outgoing Republican president George W. Bush, Stewart jokes that finally, “after eight long years good entertainers will perform for the president again.” The viewer sees footage showing performances by Beyoncé, Bono, and Bruce Springsteen. This is paired with footage of Obama and his family smiling, dancing, and clapping their hands. “The Obamas loved all of it. Oh yeah!” Stewart said enthusiastically, “No matter who was performing. Well . . . okay,” he says, noting one exception. The viewer sees country music artist Garth Brooks, which is then followed by video of the Obamas looking bored and despondent. “I’m going to have to tell you people,” Stewart says regretfully, “it’s going to be a long four years for country.” A review of the unedited taping of the concert reveals that the Obamas were in fact as lively and engaged during Brooks’s performance as they were during the other musical acts. The Daily Show doctored the video to make a joke at country music’s expense. 47

 

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Of all the country artists for a liberal comedian to ridicule, Brooks seems to be the least deserving target. In addition to being a vocal Obama supporter, the centerpiece song of his inauguration set, “We Shall Be Free,” contains the line “When we’re free to love anyone we choose.” This lyric from Brooks’s 1992 chart topper is still, as New  York magazine columnist Ian Crouch notes, “the most famous mention of gay rights in a country song” (2014). Instead of playing cowboy-​themed hits like “Rodeo” and “Wild Horses,” at the inaugural concert Brooks performed his most gospel-​influenced songs, as well as classic gospel tunes like “Shout” by the Isley Brothers. This selection accentuated the black cultural roots of country music—​roots that are commonly forgotten due to the genre’s modern association with whiteness. But Brooks was not among the “good entertainers” performing for the president that day, at least by The Daily Show’s account. Stewart’s prediction about country music embarking on a “long four years” was not farfetched considering the immediate political context. The nearly decade-​long quagmire of the Iraq War had exhausted the hyperpatriotism of the post-​9/​11 moment that country artist Toby Keith exploited. “Culture War” differences between “latte-​sipping” liberals and “NASCAR-​watching” conservatives that so animated political debates during the Bush era seemed trite next to the grave economic concerns of the Great Recession. Given these conditions, it seemed unlikely that country singers would drive national politics in the Obama era as they did during the Bush years. And yet, as if to prove Stewart wrong, “the first great song of the bailout era,” the New York Times acknowledged, came not from folk, rock, or hip hop, but from country music (Caramanica 2009) On January 28, 2009, Nashville mega-​producer John Rich of the Big & Rich duo released “Shuttin’ Detroit Down.” The song blasted the government’s response to the late 2000s economic crisis as it protected Wall Street’s interest with billions of dollars of bailout money while millions of Americans were losing their jobs and homes. Rich used the city of Detroit as “emblematic” of the unjust treatment of all “hard working Americans” (Graff 2009). The song’s lyrics oscillate between two divergent class-​based experiences of the economic crisis: While the boss man takes his bonus pay and jets on out of town D.C.’s bailing out those bankers as the farmers auction ground While they’re livin’ it up on Wall Street in that New York City town Here in the real world they’re shutting Detroit down. The third verse depicts the plight of an aging auto worker: Well that old man has been working in that plant most all his life Now his pension plan has been cut in half and he can’t afford to die.

 



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It is rare to hear a conservative attack the “the boss man” with such vigor. Equally uncommon is hearing a conservative decry the decline of auto worker pensions. This kind of rhetoric departs from the typical Republican depiction of CEOs as virtuous “job creators” and unionized auto workers as pampered and parasitic. Yet, make no mistake, John Rich is a committed conservative activist. In 2008, he stumped for Republican presidential candidate John McCain and even authored McCain’s campaign song, “Raisin’ McCain.” In interviews, Rich strived to nullify this political activity by describing “Detroit’s” message as “populist” as opposed to conservative (Willman 2009). There was an obvious marketing rationale for doing this (i.e., audience maximization); however, a textual analysis of the song supports this description: if anything, it reveals a left-​leaning orientation. Recognizing the symbolism, Rich performed “Detroit” on local radio stations across Michigan a day before its official release. Reportedly, Grand Rapids’ WBCT-​FM (B-​93.7) was flooded with calls as soon as the song aired. The station’s DJ was struck by one call “from a man who was ice fishing for dinner. He lost his job a few months ago due to the auto industry crashing. He was in tears and [it] actually made me cry” (Gonzalez 2009). On John Rich’s official webpage, under the “your stories” section, auto workers from across the country expressed their gratitude for “Detroit.” Many of them, interestingly enough, indicated they were members of the United Auto Workers (UAW), a proud left-​ leaning labor union ( John Rich n.d.). Groups further to the left were more conflicted about “Detroit,” however—​ not necessarily because of the song’s lyrics, but rather because of media outlets and groups that were promoting it. Hiram Lee (2009) of the World Socialist Website wrote, “It isn’t hard to understand why so many have cheered Rich’s song at a time when unbelievable amounts of money have gone to bailout banks and corporations while workers have been forced to suffer enormous losses.” Yet, he lamented, Rich’s active collaboration with the conservative network Fox News and the Tea Party movement “reflects enormous confusion of a wide layer, pulled to the left and to the right.” Indeed, in just the length of one month, Rich appeared on Fox News five separate times: first, on Hannity (on March 24, 2009; Hannity 2009a); second, on Glenn Beck (on March 25, 2009; Beck 2009b); and third, on America’s Newsroom (on March 27, 2009; Megan and Hemmer 2009). The music video for “Detroit” made its premiere on Foxnews.com (on April 3, 2009). On April 15, 2009, Rich would then perform “Detroit” at a Tea Party protest event that was broadcast live on Hannity (Hannity 2009b). Capping off this Fox-​centric publicity blitz, on April 23, 2009, Rich appeared on Hannity yet again to promote “Detroit’s” music video, which starred Mickey Rourke of The Wrestler (2008) and liberal country legend Kris Kristofferson (Hannity 2009c). Noting the illogicality between “Detroit’s” sympathetic appeal to help the auto industry and the

 

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hands-​off, free market approach of Republican partisans on Fox News, New York Times columnist Micheline Maynard (2009) wondered if Rich was “aware that it was Congressional Republicans who blocked a vote in the Senate last year on Detroit’s bid for an aid package.” As conservative America’s number one news source (Gottfried, Barthel, and Mitchell 2017), Fox News gave John Rich’s “Detroit” an invaluable publicity platform. But, during this promotional process, “Detroit” became enmeshed in the discursive culture of Fox News and took on the political connotations of Fox’s polarizing media brand. In addition, Fox pundits Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck tried to contain the song’s leftist qualities by redirecting its critical emphasis toward “big government” and away from “big business.” This reframing enabled Fox and the emergent Tea Party movement to use the song’s working-​ class symbolism as a tool for bolstering laissez-​faire arguments against Obama’s stimulus policies. How could “Detroit” express a class solidarity with Michigan’s recession-​ battered auto workers while simultaneously functioning as a symbolic ballast for supporting the noninterventionist policy proscriptions of the Tea Party and Fox News? This chapter argues that Fox pundits were able to control the political meaning of “Detroit” because the song’s sonic quality, and its accompanying white working-​class imagery, were already precoded as conservative. Hence, in much the same way that Jon Stewart had read Garth Brooks’s inaugural performance as illiberal and out of place, the political meanings embedded in “Detroit’s” country style overwhelmed the leftist ideological possibilities of the song’s lyrical content.

Conservative Media’s Country Roots “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee.” This is the opening line to Merle Haggard’s 1969 classic “Okie from Muskogee.” Like the Great Depression era hit “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” “Okie’s” impact rested in its ability to capture the zeitgeist of its historical moment. The song’s release concluded a decade that witnessed the rise of a youth counterculture, mass political protests, and race riots. While the mainstream press was captivated by the fashion and music of Haight-​Ashbury, San Francisco (the hippie mecca), a well of resentment was quietly accruing among the ranks of the unhip and the non–​college educated. Haggard has said that “Okie” was written mostly as a joke, so he was caught off guard when it shot up the charts. He later surmised that “Okie” must have said something “to those people who were called ‘the Silent Majority.’ ” This is the term Republican president Richard Nixon began to use in 1969 to describe his political base. “Finally,” Haggard continued, “they were having something said

 



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[on] their behalf, and they really came unwound when they heard it said, the way [my emphasis] they wanted to hear it said.”1 No matter how much media strategist Roger Ailes worked to reform Nixon’s stodgy image through television appearances, in the early 1970s the notoriously stiff president still struggled to communicate in “the way” that made voters come “unwound.” It is not as if Nixon avoided the thematic content of “Okie.” Pro-​war and anti-​hippie rhetoric saturated his political rhetoric. What Nixon needed was a style of political representation that could create the same kind of affective response from the white working class that Haggard had sparked with “Okie.” Research on the conservative movement has blossomed in recent years. This body of literature has elucidated why US political culture shifted rightward in the 1970s. Yet, histories of the postwar conservative movement have tended to focus on conservative activists and think tanks. When the media dimension of the movement is engaged, figures from the public affairs field usually take precedence (Hendershot 2011; Hemmer 2016). As country music scholar J. Lester Feder (2007) has noted, the problem with this historical approach is that it underappreciates the role that non–​news media industries played in the formation of an identifiably conservative media market:  “Before [Rush] Limbaugh and [Bill] O’Reilly could serve up entertaining conservative punditry, a marketing segment had to be created that would pay to hear conservative pronouncements by buying the products of advertisers. If any person can be credited with discovering that market, it is arguably Merle Haggard.” Here, Feder is overstating the impact of one individual and song. An array of factors contributed to the development of conservative talk radio and Fox News. However, his argument about how the politicization of the country music market in the Nixon era portended the emergence of the conservative talk industry in the 1990s does identify a veritable gap in the literature. This analytical point of departure draws our attention to the stylistic origins of today’s conservative media establishment as opposed to its political economic or intellectual roots. Too often aesthetic appeals are treated as a superficial part of political identity. Therefore, this aspect of political communication has received marginal attention by mainstream political scientists. But, as Benjamin Moffitt (2016) rightfully argues, “to ignore political style is to overlook an important stratum of political experience” (36). This is especially true, Moffitt stresses, in the modern context, where political success hinges on politicians’ access to mass media platforms, which, in turn, is significantly based on their ability to produce compelling TV or viral performances. As media corporations have come to usurp traditional

  This quote is taken from J. Lester Feder’s 2007 article “When Country Went Right.” It originally appeared in a 1976 Penthouse Magazine interview. 1

 

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political parties, “styles” and media consumer brands are becoming stronger sources of political identification than “formal” party activities (38–​39). Rhetorical scholar Robert Hariman (1995) has long stressed how political outcomes are often the result of “aesthetic reactions” (3). “Style” becomes a useful analytic for understanding “political events [that are] currently found inexplicable, irrational” (5), events such as “Detroit’s” paradoxical political reception. While “it is easy,” Hariman maintains, “to think of the world of music according to basic, collective styles of composition,” political analysts still have difficulty recognizing how “aesthetic sensibilities [inform] ordinary political decisions.” Partisan politics is not that different from the pop music market. It too is organized by aesthetically geared subcultures, each with their own “symbolic repertoire [and] customary set of communicative designs” (10–​11). In the late 1960s, conservative politicians started to poach the “symbolic repertoire” of country music. In this way, the key architects of Nixon’s “Silent Majority” rhetoric such as Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips did not really originate the enduring tropes and narratives of cultural populism. As Diane Pecknold (2007) has argued, Nixon’s strategy team adopted the historic enemies of the country music industry as their own, “the cultural holders of power who denigrated the genre: the media executives who ignored it, the academics and preservationists who dismissed it as commercial drivel, the urban sophisticates who sneered at rural hicks” (219). The Nixon era marks the beginning of a fifty-​year marriage that is alive and well today, evident in the country-​heavy list of performers at Donald Trump’s 2016 Republican National Convention and 2017 inauguration. These events included artists such as Toby Keith, Chris Janson, Kid Rock, and, last but not least, John Rich. At this juncture, country’s relationship with the Republican Party seems like a natural fit. Yet, a deeper examination of the genre’s history illustrates how this political-​cultural association was, in part, manufactured by forces external to the industry and culture.

From “Okie” to “Detroit” In the 1960s, liberal leaders like Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson started to leverage the state to address the racial inequities that civil rights activists had vocalized. This is when the conservative movement’s anti-​statist populism gained appeal with white working-​class voters (Lowndes 2005, 171). Still, conservatives had to devise a way to break this voting bloc’s remaining loyalties to the Democratic Party. As John Skrentny and Thomas Sugrue (2008) point out, the civil rights movement created “a growing awareness of the power of group specific identity as a tool of political mobilization and claim making” (178). Taking

 



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cues from the civil rights movement, the conservative movement would begin to develop its own brand of identity politics. With an end of “nominal racism,” overt appeals to whiteness were no longer tenable. Hence, to exploit white backlash sentiment, conservatives needed to “fashion a new group identity” (178). One strategy that Skrentny and Sugrue’s (2008) research emphasizes involved celebrating the “ethnicity” of white subgroups in the Northeast such as Irish, Polish, and Italian Americans. They document how the Nixon administration used calculated “symbolic gestures of inclusion and affiliation” (175) to target white ethnics, such as attending festivals and supporting “ethnic heritage programs” (185). Corresponding with this “Northern strategy” was the “Southern strategy” that Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips (1969) elaborated in his book The Emerging Republican Majority. Phillips recognized how central country music is to Southern identity. He encouraged Nixon to actively court the country music industry, and court it he did. Nixon invited Merle Haggard, along with other country stars like Johnny Cash, to perform at the White House. In turn, Nixon became the first US president to visit the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, the genre’s home and capital. While both of these identitarian appeals were key ingredients in the broader construction of Nixon’s Silent Majority, the Southern strategy had greater scope. Country music symbolized “Southerness,” but in the 1970s the currency of this regional appeal had expanded beyond the Southern states. As Feder (2006) explains: Southern popular culture—​country music—​provided a musical home for the growing number of Americans who began to share the South’s anger at the government and mass media. . . . By the end of the 1960s, defiance had become a southern brand; in the 1970s, country music helped export it to the nation. (198) “In fact,” Feder notes, “by 1970, over two-​thirds of country sales were made outside the South” (194). Diane Pecknold’s (2007) book The Selling Sound documents how, from 1958 to 1972, the Country Music Association executed national marketing campaigns that effectively established the country music format in urban and non-​Southern radio markets. The CMA’s ability to communicate “both the size and cultural uniqueness of ” the country music audience attracted Republican strategists. President Nixon gave lip service to country’s artistic merits, but what he truly respected was the genre’s growing commercial clout (Pecknold 2007, 218). Given Nixon’s subsequent presidential victory in 1972, Republican outreach efforts to country music were paying dividends. Yet, not all conservatives were happy with this arrangement. William F. Buckley’s National Review, a long-​time

 

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hub of conservative intellectual thought, was particularly critical of the conservative movement’s turn to cultural populism. According to National Review editor Chilton Williamson Jr. (1978), “flattering the customs and taste” of the lower middle class was a risk for conservatives (713). “Inflam[ing]” class-​cultural “prejudice[s]‌,” Williamson warned, could mutate into what he termed “country & western Marxism,” that is, into a broader set of class grievances. Williamson’s suspicion that country music could suddenly turn left was not without warrant. According to country singer Dwight Yokam, the genre’s core identity was forged in “Grapes of Wrath culture,” that is, from the economic hardships of the Dustbowl and the Great Depression (La Chappelle 2007, 18). As evidenced by contemporary songs like “Detroit,” country music still contains—​ at least residually—​Steinbeck-​like, social realist elements. The class themes and textures of the country music tradition could, theoretically, lend themselves to a leftist populist project. Yet, Williamson falsely assumed that inherent connections exist between class-​based music styles and political ideologies and underestimated the ability of politically motivated actors in the media industry to construct linkages between taste and ideology. In Proud to Be an Okie (2007), Peter La Chappelle shows how the politics of Haggard’s “Okie” were complex and did not neatly fit within simple left/​right, anti-​war/​pro-​war binaries. His book chronicles how conservative board members of the Academy of Country and Western Music (ACWM) such as Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and Master Sergeant Bill Boyd—​who put “Okie” on heavy rotation on Armed Forces Radio—​helped ensure that the song would be publicly received as conservative and pro-​war. Fellow Oklahoma migrants familiar with Haggard’s earlier work could, La Chappelle writes, “rearticulate and reimagine the song in oppositional and alternative ways.” Nevertheless, “their readings and reshapings could not compete with a whole country music broadcasting-​ recording-​publicity machine posed to support the dominant interpretation. By sheer volume alone, the industry had already won the battle over the popular memory” (206). When “Detroit” dropped in 2009, it was likened to “Okie.” Yet, all too often Haggard’s anti-​countercultural anthem gets evoked any time a politically charged country song rises to prominence. Critics immediately drew parallels between “Okie” and Toby Keith’s 2002 “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (the Angry American).” This facile comparison brushes over several key differences. Sure, “Okie” contains some pro–​Vietnam War references (“we don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street”), but its jingoism pales in comparison to Keith’s “Courtesy” (“we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way”). Keith’s “War on Terror” anthem focuses exclusively on military, geopolitical tensions, whereas “Okie’s” emphasis rests primarily on domestic class ones. In this way,

 



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“Detroit” is far more similar to “Okie” than “Courtesy.” But there are key differences between “Detroit” and “Okie” as well. The class differences “Okie” describes are primarily taste based (“leather boots are still in style for manly footwear,” “beads and Roman sandals won’t be seen”). In contrast, “Detroit’s” class politics are squarely economic. For this reason, New York Times music critic Jon Caramanica (2009) argued, “Detroit” has “less to do with ‘Okie’ and more to do with the left-​wing protest music of that era.” “Detroit’s” lyrical substance, combined with its historical timing, had a greater possibility to realize Chilton Williamson Jr.’s conservative nightmare. It used the cultural populist aesthetic of country music to convey an economic populist message in the midst of a once-​in-​a-​generation downturn. And yet, not only did it not push the nation toward “country & western Marxism,” but also it would be used instead to rally support for the free market agenda of Fox News and the Tea Party movement.

Fox News and Country Music Rupert Murdoch is the founder of Fox News’ parent company News Corporation (now Fox Corporation). In the 1950s, he worked in the British tabloid news market colloquially known as “Fleet Street.” It was here that Murdoch learned how to craft compelling news content formulas. The ingenuity of the British editorial mix is not simply that it paired politics with entertainment but rather how it offered readers a consistent set of anti-​elitist rationales for explaining why these two disparate realms of public life are interconnected (Peck 2019). Murdoch’s first attempt at importing the Fleet Street formula to the United States was in 1976 when he purchased and revamped the New York Post. Then, with the launch of Fox News in 1996, Murdoch would adapt the tabloid-​partisan formula of the British newsstand to American television. Born and raised in Australia, Murdoch did not intuitively understand the nuances of American pop culture and politics, so he wisely appointed someone who did to head his American cable news venture. This individual was Roger Ailes. Ailes’s dual skill set in entertainment and politics was a perfect fit for Murdoch’s “Fox News” project. Before becoming a media strategist for the Nixon administration in 1968, Ailes directed a daytime talk show called The Michael Douglas Show and in the 1980s and 1990s helped produce tabloid news magazine shows like A Current Affair and Inside Edition. Concurrently, he continued to do political consultancy work for Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush. Murdoch and Ailes may have had different experiences and bases of media expertise, but both figures mutually realized that creating a market for

 

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conservative television in the United States entailed more than offering audiences congenial ideological content. Effective political branding, they intuited, must capture how partisan identities are expressed as “taste cultures” (Bourdieu 1984). Having backgrounds in tabloid newspapers and television entertainment, Murdoch and Ailes had the requisite knowledge to design a programming style that reflected how conservatives perceive themselves as working-​class underdogs and, likewise, how they view liberals as cultural snobs. In my book Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class (Peck 2019), I illustrate how Fox News programming combines tabloid aesthetics with populist epistemic appeals to represent Republican partisanship as a proxy for working-​class culture. This book traces how Fox News formulated its cultural populist marketing address by appropriating the communicative traits of the Anglo-​American tabloid tradition. However, the network has also mined non–​news media forms to develop a populist style, chiefly country music. According to David Robinson (2011), the brand association between country music and Fox News reached its “full value” in the post-​9/​11 era (173). During the buildup to the Iraq invasion, Fox saturated its top-​rated opinion programs with the who’s who of the country music world. This guest list included Clint Black, Dolly Parton, Charlie Daniels, Randy Travis, and many more (Hart 2005, 163–​164). When Natalie Maines, the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, made critical comments against the Iraq invasion and President Bush in 2003, Fox News, like other conservative outlets, chided her viciously. This contributed to the Chicks’ systematic blacklisting from country radio and concerts, which, in effect, destroyed the band’s career in the country genre (Robinson 2011, 175). Rounding the corner back to the country music field, in his 2003 CMT Video of the Year Award acceptance speech, Dixie Chicks nemesis Toby Keith expressed his gratitude for Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush administration’s secretary of defense (Gilbert 2003). The Fox News personality who has done the most to align the network’s brand with country music is Sean Hannity. In 2003 and 2004, Hannity hosted several country music events that were patriotically dubbed “Freedom Concerts.” Weaving country music into his programming, Hannity used Martina McBride’s song “Independence Day” as the opening music for his talk radio show for many years and, on Fox, he plays country songs between his segment breaks. Hannity has said his dream is to quit cable news and become a country countdown host. “I’m that much of a fan,” he told country music reporter Chris Willman. However, Hannity’s tie to country goes beyond mere pronouncements of fandom. Hannity’s talk radio show and Fox News program serve an important promotional function as they expose country music to, using Hannity’s words, a “new audience” of “Right-​leaning urbanites” (Willman 2005,  3–​4).

 



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Given this history, it makes sense that John Rich chose to appear on Fox News to promote his new album, which featured “Detroit” as its lead single. “Son of a Preacher Man hits stores today,” Fox host Sean Hannity plugged before introducing Rich as a guest on his “Great American Panel.” In this March 24, 2009, episode, Rich did not perform. Instead, he played the part of cable news pundit. This is but one of many instances whereby country singers and conservative news personalities crisscross each other’s media fields and even switch roles. In June of 2009 Bill O’Reilly—​the network’s former number one host—​presented a CMT award with country singer Naomi Judd. Riffing on the catch phrase of O’Reilly’s eponymous Fox show, Judd joked, “I try to live in the ‘No Spin Zone’ all the time” (Billboard 2009). Just as Hannity’s “Great American Panel” turned Rich into a “political analyst,” Rich would symbolically transform Fox host Megyn Kelly into a “country star” when he handed her a customized Gibson guitar with her name emblazoned on the neck. “You got to come to Nashville,” he told her, “we’ll cut a country record” (Hannity March 27, 2009). The repetition of these recursive moments stitches the “code and symbolism” (Firestein 2005) of country music into the fabric of Fox’s programming and, conversely, makes the Fox News brand a conservative brand, an integral part of the country music subculture. “Three chords and truth” becomes the “No Spin Zone” and vice versa.

Fox News and “Detroit” During Hannity’s March 24, 2009, discussion panel, Democratic strategist Steve Murphy argued that government should force the bailed-​out banks to file bankruptcy so contracts guaranteeing executive bonuses can be broken. “Just like they’re pushing for the givebacks [i.e., benefit cuts] from the workers in Detroit,” Murphy said and then turned to his fellow panelist John Rich, “as you so eloquently point out . . . [in] ‘Shuttin’ Down Detroit’ ” [sic]. Rich seemed to appreciate Murphy’s policy argument responding, “Right.” Seeking to distance the country singer from the panel’s lone Democrat, Hannity began questioning the Obama administration’s “honesty.” Partisan banter between Murphy and Hannity ensued. Frustrated, Rich broke in and said, “Here’s what people are relating to,” and he proceeded to recite, not sing, the lyrics of “Detroit,” finishing “while they’re living up in Wall Street in that New York City town but here in the real world they’re shutting Detroit down.” “That’s well said,” Hannity remarked and then immediately injected partisan spin:  “That’s the Obama plan, Steve.” Murphy rejoined, “That’s not the Obama’s plan, that’s the Bush plan.” The next day Rich appeared on Glenn Beck and recounted the story of what motivated him to pen “Detroit.” A “story came out about the CEO of Merrill

 

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Lynch and he took $1.2 million [of bailout money] to redecorate his office,” he told Beck, “including a $38,000 toilet. . . . I was watching [and] blood shot out of my eyes.” Once again, Rich recited “Detroit’s” lyrics to punctuate his central point: “In the real world they’re shutting Detroit down while the boss man takes his bonus pay and jets on out of town.” Rich’s negative portrayal of the “boss man” did not fit well within the free market ideological framework of Beck’s show, a framework that consistently depicted “businessmen” as “moral heroes” (Beck 2009c). Seeking to redirect Rich’s rage away from the business class, Beck asked Rich, “Do you include Washington in that?” “Absolutely,” the country singer confirmed. Like Hannity, in this episode Beck played the role of music promoter telling his audience flatly, “I want you to go out and get [ John Rich’s album].” As he said this, the camera zoomed in on Rich, who was sitting on an elevated podium in the set’s background (an unusual sight for a news program). Before singing, Rich dedicated the song to “all the hard-​working men and women watching Glenn Beck today.” A few weeks later, Rich would perform “Detroit” at the Academy of Country Music (ACM) awards in front of his country music peers. Interestingly enough, in the time between his Glenn Beck appearance and the ACM awards, Rich decided to tweak the previous introductory dedication. “This goes out to all the hard-​working,” then pausing for dramatic effect, “tax-​paying Americans from coast to coast that love this country as much as I do” (April 5, 2009). In an act of savvy cross-​promotion and cobranding, this modification anticipated how Sean Hannity would introduce “Detroit” at his “Tax Day Tea Party” broadcast event. This April 15, 2009, episode of Hannity was broadcast in front of a massive crowd of sign-​wielding Tea Party activists. Hannity informed the audience, “We have [a]‌very special performance [by John Rich] about a city . . . Detroit. They’re really suffering because of high taxation” (Hannity 2009b). Taxation is why Detroit is suffering? The lyrics of Rich’s song directs far more ire at upper-​ class privilege and de-​industrialization than taxation. Yet, thanks to the “paratextual” (Gray 2010) information Fox built around the song prior to the event, “Detroit’s” critique and affective thrust was, yet again, retargeted at government, notably one that Democrats currently had majority control over. “If I were a betting man,” Rich said to Hannity and the audience, “I would bet that . . . even the President of the United States [is] watching this right now.”

The Hip-​Hop President Who Saved Detroit A month prior to John Rich’s guest performance, Glenn Beck argued that the auto industry should shut down, that is, if one truly believes in free market principles. Beck used the metaphor of a forest fire to make this point. The fire in this

 



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metaphor is the economic crisis and the auto industry is the forest. “Fires are natural, and they’re actually good for the soil,” he explained to his audience. Beck then applied this naturalistic economic analogy to the contemporaneous policy debate on whether the government should grant GM and Chrysler, two struggling car companies, additional stimulus aid. They’re asking for, Beck intoned with annoyance, “another $21 billion just to survive. . . . [T]‌hat’s $39 billion just to delay the death of an industry ruled by mismanagement, iron-​fist unions, and government regulations” (Beck 2009a). Beck’s “let it burn down” policy position was not radical or outside of the Republican mainstream. Many of the party’s top leaders opposed the auto bailouts. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (2008) wrote an infamous New  York Times op-​ed entitled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” Other top Republicans such as Mike Pence and Newt Gingrich also argued against the auto bailouts and did so on Hannity and other Fox programs. Gingrich particularly blamed the UAW for Detroit’s economic woes. This made his guest appearance on Hannity’s April 15, 2009, “Tax Day Tea Party” broadcast deeply ironic. This episode closed with a performance of a song, “Detroit,” that valorizes unionized auto workers. Directly contradicting the noninterventionist policy proscriptions of Fox News, in June 2009 the Obama administration pushed forward a stimulus plan to give the auto industry an additional $30 billion. At the time, this move was widely unpopular. Yet, by the close of 2010, it was becoming increasingly clear to economists that the auto bailouts were working. On November 18, 2010, GM—​ a company that was on the brink of extinction just a year prior—​announced one of the largest initial public offerings in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. In light of these results, The Economist (2010), a free market–​minded publication that initially opposed the auto bailouts, reluctantly admitted that “an apology is due to Barack Obama.” In the end, Obama’s auto stimulus measures saved an estimated 1.5 million jobs (Reuters 2013). So why was he not hailed as a populist, blue-​collar hero? President Obama’s embodied blackness, combined with the racialized sectors of mass entertainment with which he aligned, goes a long way in answering this question. As the former editor of Harvard Law Review, Obama cultivated a public reputation for being cerebral and refined. Nevertheless, he was quite savvy at engaging popular culture to appear more relatable. He “slow jammed” the news on The Tonight Show, he read “mean tweets” on Jimmy Kimmel, and he got roasted by comedian Zach Galifianakis on Between Two Ferns. But what truly separated Obama’s pop cultural strategy from every president that came before was his embrace of hip-​hop, a distinctly African American music form. Obama invited well-​known rappers such as Common, Kendrick Lamar, and Queen Latifah to

 

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perform at the White House. Yet, Obama’s courtship of hip-​hop did not grant him the same populist praise that Nixon reaped for reaching out to country music. In the United States, the working class is divided by race, both economically and culturally. This fact poses unique challenges for any politician of color seeking to perform a working-​class identity for populist appeal. As I’ve demonstrated elsewhere (Peck 2019), Fox News pundits like Bill O’Reilly criticized Obama for giving hip-​hop the respect of the presidency. He and other conservatives disparaged the genre as criminal, hypersexual, and morally baseless. However, the cultural gaze of white liberals also problematized Obama’s attempt to use hip-​hop as a populist symbolic resource. Though more inclusive, the liberal view reads Black music as “hip” and “youthful.” This evaluative stance denies the multigenerational quality of hip-​hop and obscures how the genre functions as “everyday” music for nonwhite workers in the prime of their life. While the conservative media’s reaction to Obama’s engagement with hip-​hop was generally negative and the liberal media’s reaction was positive, the evaluative gaze of both partisan sectors was shaded by a similar racial logic that negates hip-​hop’s working-​class elements, elements the “white” genre of country music is credited with almost automatically.

Identity and Aesthetics: Key Analytics for a Partisan-​Tabloid Age In the mid-​1980s, the wall that had long separated political television (“hard news”) from entertainment television (“soft news”) started to break down. Geoffrey Baym (2009) explains this as a shift away from the “political-​ normative” values of the modernist public sphere toward the “aesthetic-​ expressive” logic of postmodern, commercial entertainment, or what media studies scholar John Caldwell (1995) describes as a turn toward “excessive stylization.” Fast forward several decades: the presence of pop culture in the modern newscast has become a given; thus, the important question now is not whether news outlets rely on pop culture to enhance their consumer appeal but rather which forms of popular entertainment they choose to have alliances with and what the underlying sociopolitical logic is that guides their stylistic choices. A growing body of political science research shows that partisan identification is more greatly determined by social background than by policy preferences and political philosophical beliefs (Green and Schickler 2009). Running parallel with this trend, journalism scholars are increasingly moving away from the informational conceptualization of partisan news audiences toward an identitarian

 



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approach (Kreiss 2018). In turn, they are beginning to recognize how the political identity of contemporary news organizations are fundamentally constituted by “aesthetic style” and “taste signifiers” (Anderson 2018). What remains to be fleshed out, however, is exactly how partisan news outlets use aesthetic appeals to imagine and represent political communities. In this chapter, I used John Rich’s “Detroit” as a case study to show how Fox News used a specific pop cultural form to endow its conservative political brand with affective power and social meaning. The benefits of tracking the migration of the country style from the music sector into the news sector in this type multifield analysis elucidates the deep-​seated race and class-​based cultural lines that organize the entire US news-​entertainment complex. It also highlights how conservatives and liberals mutually reproduce the system of political-​taste alignments that the Nixon administration kick-​started in the 1970s. This chapter encourages greater scholarly attention to the way conservative news actively partisanizes national taste divisions (e.g. “lowbrow” vs. “aspirational”). Understanding the specific representational techniques and cultural referents that conservative media utilize to execute this is exceedingly important, especially when a bona fide tabloid figure, Donald Trump, sits in the White House.

References Anderson, C. W. 2018. “Empirical Failures: Data Journalism, Cultural Identity, and the Trump Campaign.” In Trump and the Media, edited by Pablo J. Boczkowski and Zizi Papacharissi, 33–​39. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Baym, Geoffrey. 2009. From Cronkite to Colbert: The Evolution of Broadcast News. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beck, Glenn. 2009a. Transcript. Glenn Beck. Fox News Network, February 18. Nexis Uni. http://​ www.lexisnexis.com/​hottopics/​lnacademic/​. Beck, Glenn. 2009b. Transcript. Glenn Beck. Fox News Network, March 25. Nexis Uni. http://​ www.lexisnexis.com/​hottopics/​lnacademic/​. Beck, Glenn. 2009c. Transcript. Glenn Beck. Fox News Network, April 2. Nexis Uni. http://​www. lexisnexis.com/​hottopics/​lnacademic/​. Billboard. 2009. “Taylor Swift Has Big Night at CMT Awards.” June 17. https://​www.billboard. com/​articles/​news/​268356/​taylor-​swift-​has-​big-​night-​at-​cmt-​awards. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Caldwell, John. 1995. Televisuality:  Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Caramanica, Jon. 2009. “Protest from the Right Side of Country.” New  York Times, March 30. https://​www.nytimes.com/​2009/​03/​31/​arts/​music/​31rich.html. Cowie, Jefferson. 2010. Stayin’ Alive:  The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. New York: New Press. Crouch, Ian. 2014. “Garth Brooks:  Country Music’s Square, Liberal Dad.” New  Yorker, November 13. https://​www.newyorker.com/​culture/​culture-​desk/​ garth-​brooks-​country-​musics-​square-​liberal-​dad.

 

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The Economist. 2010. “Government Motors No More.” August 21. https://​www.economist.com/​ node/​16846494. Feder, J. Lester. 2006. “‘Song of the South’:  Country Music, Race, Region, and the Politics of Culture, 1920–​1974.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Feder, J. Lester. 2007. “When Country Went Right.” American Prospect, February 16. http://​prospect.org/​article/​when-​country-​went-​right. Firestein, David. 2005. “The Honky-​Tonk Gap.” Vital Speeches of the Day 72 (3): 83–​88. Gilbert, Calvin. 2003. “Toby Keith Captures Three Flameworthy Awards.” CMT News, April 8. http://​www.cmt.com/​news/​1471105/​toby-​keith-​captures-​three-​flameworthy-​awards/​. Gonzalez, John. 2009. “Michigan’s Reality? John Rich’s ‘Shuttin’ Detroit Down’ Hits Home.” MLive.com, January 29. http://​blog.mlive.com/​goinggonzo/​2009/​01/​michigans_​reality_​ john_​richs_​s.html. Gottfried, Jeffrey, Michael Barthel, and Amy Mitchell. 2017. “Trump, Clinton Voters Divided in Their Main Source for Election News.” Pew Research Center, January 18. http://​www.journalism.org/​2017/​01/​18/​trump-​clinton-​voters-​divided-​in-​their-​main-​source-​for-​election-​ news/​. Graff, Gary. 2009. “Singer Pushing Message of ‘Shuttin’ Detroit Down.’” Morning Sun, March 11. http://​www.themorningsun.com/​article/​MS/​20090311/​ENTERTAINMENT01/​ 303119985. Gray, J. 2010. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press. Green, Donald, and Eric Schickler. 2009. “A Spirited Defense of Party Identification Against Its Critics.” In Political Parties and Partisanship: Social Identity and Individual Attitudes, edited by John Bartle and Paolo Bellucci, 180–​199. New York: Routledge. Hannity, Sean. 2009a. Video. Hannity. Fox News Network, March 24. UCLA Library NewsScape. http://​tvnews.library.ucla.edu. Hannity, Sean. 2009a. Video. Hannity. Fox News Network, April 15. UCLA Library NewsScape. http://​tvnews.library.ucla.edu. Hannity, Sean. 2009a. Transcript. Hannity. Fox News Network, April 23. Nexis Uni. http://​www. lexisnexis.com/​hottopics/​lnacademic/​. Hariman, Robert. 1995. Political Style: The Artistry of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hart, William. 2005. “The Country Connection: Country Music, 9/​11, and the War on Terrorism.” In The Selling of 9/​11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity, edited by Dana Heller, 155–​173. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Hemmer, Nicole. 2016. Messengers of the Right:  Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hendershot, Heather. 2011. What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-​Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest. Chicago: University of Chicago. John Rich. n.d. Shuttin’ Down Detrot. Accessed March 8, 2018. http://​www.johnrich.com/​index. php?page=detroit. Kelly, Megyn, and Bill Hemmer. 2009. Video. America’s Newsroom. Fox News Network, March 27. UCLA Library NewsScape. http://​tvnews.library.ucla.edu. Kreiss, Daniel. 2018. “The Media Are About Identity, Not Information.” In Trump and the Media, edited by Pablo J. Boczkowski and Zizi Papacharissi, 93–​100. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. La Chapelle, Peter. 2007. Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lee, Hiram. 2009. “‘Shutting Detroit Down’: Country Singer John Rich Sings About the Crisis, but Also Spreads Confusion.” World Socialist Website, April 22. https://​www.wsws.org/​en/​ articles/​2009/​04/​rich-​a22.html. Lowndes, Joseph. 2005. “From Founding Violence to Political Hegemony:  The Conservative Populism of George Wallace.” In Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, edited by Francisco Panizza, 144–​171. New York: Verso.

 



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Maynard, Micheline. 2009. “‘Shuttin’ Detroit Down’ Heads Up Charts.” New York Times, February 12. https://​wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/​2009/​02/​12/​shuttin-​detroit-​down-​heads-​up-​ charts/​. Moffit, Benjamin. 2016. Global Rise of Populism:  Performance, Political Style and Representation. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Peck, Reece. 2019. Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pecknold, Diane. 2007. The Selling Sound:  The Rise of the Country Music Industry. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Phillips, Kevin. 1969. The Emerging Republican Majority. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House. Reuters. 2013. “Auto Bailout Saved 1.5 Million U.S. Jobs–​Study.” December 9.  https://​www. reuters.com/​article/​autos-​bailout-​study-​idUSL1N0JO0XU20131209. Robinson, Dave. 2011. “Country Crooners and Fox News: Country Music and the FOX Brand.” In Rock Brands: The Selling Sound in a Media Saturated Culture, edited by Elizabeth Barfoot Christian, 213–​232. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Romney, Mitt. 2008. “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” New York Times, November 18. https://​www. nytimes.com/​2008/​11/​19/​opinion/​19romney.html. Skrentny, John, and Thomas Sugrue. 2008. “The White Ethnic Strategy.” In Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, edited by Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, 171–​192. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stewart, Jon. 2009. Video. The Daily Show. Comedy Central, January 19. UCLA Library NewsScape. http://​tvnews.library.ucla.edu. Williamson, Chilton, Jr. 1978. “Country & Western Marxism: To the Nashville Station.” National Review 30 (23): 711–​716. Willman, Chris. 2005. Rednecks & Bluenecks:  The Politics of Country Music. New  York:  The New Press. Willman, Chris. 2009. “Jamey Johnson and John Rich Help Country Radio Get Real.” Huffington Post, May. https://​www.huffingtonpost.com/​chris-​willman/​jamey-​johnson-​and-​john-​ri_​ b_​174425.html.

 

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Weaponizing Victimhood Discourses of Oppression and the Maintenance of Supremacy on the Right Lee Bebout

Patrick Buchanan and Lou Dobbs warn of an ongoing Reconquista where the Mexican government, Mexican immigrants, and radical Chicanos are taking over the United States (Buchanan 2002, 2006; Beirich 2008). Rush Limbaugh bemoans the way “feminazis” have pushed their agenda and the “confusion of traditional gender roles” (Taylor 2017). White supremacists decry diversity as “white genocide” (whitegenocideproject.com). David Horowitz, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, and the “Professor Watchlist” warn of liberal professors indoctrinating the minds of American youth (Horowitz 2007; Planas 2015; professorwatchlist.org). Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck report on the latest skirmishes of the “War on Christmas” where Christian values are under attack from a secularist mainstream (O’Reilly 2016; Wilson 2013). Placed together, these examples evidence four common characteristics: they deploy hyperbole; they assert a moment of crisis; they claim victimhood; and they appear on the political right of the United States. This discursive maneuver, what I  am calling “weaponized victimhood,” transcends media formats and finds expression within diverse political identities of the Right, from white supremacists and nativists to evangelical Christians and men’s rights activists. These groups weaponize victimhood to maintain power and privilege in the guise of powerlessness and justice. Weaponized victimhood has become a dominant structure in conservative media and political thought, a rhetorical strategy that both shapes and reveals the key logics of the contemporary Right. Consider, for example, the perennial War on Christmas. While the concept was created by the nativist Peter Brimelow in 1999 and became the topic of a 2005 book by John Gibson, Bill O’Reilly spread the “War on Christmas” narrative over twelve years on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor 64

 



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(Gibson 2005; Cassino 2016). Soon the discourse permeated the Right—​the War on Christmas has been a focus on Fox and Friends, The Blaze, and other right-​ oriented media. The battles stretch across the United States from the cashier at the local store wishing someone “Happy Holidays” to public schools honoring multiple cultural traditions in their holiday pageants. Sometimes the war involves the removal of religious iconography and language from governmental spaces; other times the war emerges in the marketplace, as when Starbucks released a plain red cup for its holiday season (Whitten 2015). And strangely, the War on Christmas seems to begin a bit earlier each year. For scholars, it is a mistake to take claims of the war at face value, but it is equally a mistake to write it off as an absurdity. The War on Christmas is more than a catchy slogan developed to sell a political fantasy. Rather, the War on Christmas exposes how metaphors shape thought (Lakoff and Johnson 2003)  and how thoughts shape political identities and actions. Framed as a war, contemporary debates about public celebrations and recognition of holidays take on a specific structure. Like other wars, there are “battles,” “targets,” and “aggressors”; a struggle between “us” and “them” and “good and evil”; and potentially a “clash of civilizations.” Critically, the War on Christmas frames Christians as victims. After all, the war does “target” their holiday, and by extension their faith identity. Thus, assertions of a War on Christmas are simultaneously expressions of victimhood. The claim that “they” are attacking “us” positions Christians as besieged victims, but more important, as victims who have the moral authority to fight back. This chapter is not interested in the War on Christmas in isolation but in the underlying logic and discourse the war evidences. Since at least the 1960s and 1970s right-​oriented media, politicians, and cultural workers have positioned themselves as victims and weaponized their position to fight for the maintenance of privilege. The War on Christmas is not an outlier but a critical manifestation of conservative movement logic that can be found elsewhere. Weaponized victimhood has emerged as a dominant discursive and ideological structure across the media formats and constituent elements that make up the political Right. Because these otherwise potentially disparate groups are asked to see themselves as victims under siege, their shared logic makes mobilization and coalition based on perceived grievances possible. Moving beyond the War on Christmas, this chapter explores how victimhood is expressed within two other constituent communities and ideologies:  men’s rights activists and white supremacists. These examples show not just how disparate actors may deploy victimhood but also how this rhetorical maneuver undergirds specific political identities and agendas across the Right. From there, this chapter examines how victimhood is weaponized for strategic effect within three interconnected realms: the discursive and ideological, the psychoaffective, and the sociopolitical. Paying attention to these manifestations of victimhood exposes

 

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how common logics and strategies connect otherwise discrete political actors and ideologies.

Theorizing Victimhood Systems of oppression have long rendered “Others” as potential and actual threats to those in power. The massacre of Indigenous people was underwritten by the potential threat they posed for settlers—​caused by the settlement on and expropriation of Indigenous lands. During Jim Crow, Black male sexuality was cast as a threat to vulnerable (i.e., victimizable) white womanhood. US whites weaponized this faux-​victim status to legitimize racial violence, occlude sexual power, and secure the color line. Today’s victimhood logic stretches across forms of social power relations, from gender and religion to race and nationality. This heightened prevalence of victimhood has coalesced on the US political right, emerging and growing in force from the 1960s and 1970s onward. This weaponized victimhood must be understood as distinct from the efforts of aggrieved communities seeking social justice, for weaponized victimhood is characterized by an inverse relationship to power. While social justice movements have long pointed to injustice to achieve equality, those that deploy weaponized victimhood do so to maintain their positions in a social hierarchy. Weaponized victimhood is a strategic rhetorical reaction to the social tumult of the mid-​twentieth-​century United States. Various liberation struggles from the African American civil rights struggle and the Chicano movement to women’s liberation and LBGTQ equality efforts claimed grievance against systems of power. In response, those in positions of relative power appropriated a discourse of victimization to secure their position within a system of inequality.1 For example, Mexican Americans demanded desegregated schools and curricular representation, and politicians invested in whiteness claimed that ethnic studies programs teach hatred for white people.2 Or women’s rights groups asserted the need for domestic violence shelters, and men’s rights activists claimed that those shelters discriminate against men.3 These examples share a similar logic and structure. They claim victimization and fairness to secure inequality.

  I use the terms “relative power” and “relative privilege” to mark the ways in which the sociopolitical relationship to marginalization is always relational. As is often misunderstood on the right, bearing privilege does not mean that one will not struggle in life nor does it mean that one is exempt from forms of oppression. Rather, because all humans bear numerous social identities, they may also experience privilege and oppression across several axes of power. 2   Arizona’s 2010 HB 2281 sought to ban ethnic studies curriculum under this logic. 3   Minnesota’s Booth v. Hvass epitomizes this dynamic. 1

 



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One could see this as a cold, calculated rhetorical maneuver to obscure systems of power through adopting rhetorical cache of twentieth-​century liberation struggles. However, the weaponization of victimhood is not just a response to the rhetoric of twentieth-​century liberation struggles but also a response to the ideological, social, and political transformation those struggles brought about. As Howard Winant has contended, the twentieth century saw a global realignment of racial power, which he terms the “racial break” (Winant 2004, xiii–​xvi, 15–​18). Through the fight against fascism, Cold War dynamics, anti-​colonial struggles, and racial freedom movements like those in the United States, white supremacy shifted from a system of official state endorsement to more covert manifestations. This same time also saw shifts in gender and sexuality marked by feminist and LBGTQ liberation struggles. Likewise, in the United States the unquestioned hegemonic status of protestant Christianity has come under question. Taking Winant’s racial break as a model, one can see that the mid-​to late twentieth-​century United States was marked by a multifaceted crisis for those in positions of relative power as well as the ideologies and discourses that sustain them—​in other words, those invested in systems of inequality come to see their identities as under threat. This is not to suggest that white supremacy, patriarchy, and Christianity have lost their privileged standing in the United States. Rather, they have undergone significant transformation, a transformation that upends those invested in those systems. Thus, the weaponization of victimhood emerges neither ex nihilo nor in response to one axis of social change but in response to a constellation of social tumult. While appearing new, weaponized victimhood shares a common genealogy with Richard Hofstadter’s paranoid style and Michael Rogin’s countersubversive tradition. Like Hofstadter’s (1965) paranoid style, those who weaponize victimhood today are convinced that their “political passions are unselfish and patriotic,” which intensifies their “feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation” (4). As with Rogin’s (1987) formulation of countersubversive demonology, weaponized victimhood is part of mainstream political culture that actively dehumanizes and stigmatizes its political foes with a faux defensive stance (xiii, xiv). Weaponized victimhood may be seen as an outward expression of what Michael Kimmel has called “aggrieved entitlement.” In an effort to explain the anger prevalent in white men, Kimmel (2013) theorizes aggrieved entitlement as the emotional reaction to the loss of privilege: Aggrieved entitlement can mobilize one politically, but it is often a mobilization toward the past, not the future, to restore that which one feels has been lost. It invariably distorts one’s vision and leads to a

 

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misdirected anger—​often at those just below you on the ladder, because clearly they deserve what they are getting far less than you do. (24) Kimmel’s formulation may be used to explain other manifestations as well. Aggrieved entitlement names the outrage Bill O’Reilly feels and generates in his audience when a school changes its Christmas concert to a holiday concert. Aggrieved entitlement names the outrage when a woman or person of color is cast in a role traditionally designated for a man or white person—​the feeling that one has lost ground triggers and generates claims to victimhood. The dynamic works in the other direction as well. Articulations of victimhood give expression and legitimacy to feelings of power lost. If aggrieved entitlement is the emotional state, weaponized victimhood is the rhetorical maneuver. Weaponized victimhood arises as an ideological pose and rhetorical tool of backlash and intransigence. For scholars, weaponized victimhood marks the expression of aggrieved entitlement; for those who deploy it, weaponized victimhood functions as a way of consciously or unconsciously maintaining systems of privilege and buttressing political identities. Conceptualizing weaponized victimhood as a rhetorical strategy requires two critical caveats. I  do not wish to suggest that rhetorical actors are fully aware of their rhetorical choices, nor do I mean that people assert a knowingly false victimhood. Rather, because language and ideology are intertwined through interpellation, the language of victimhood exposes conscious and unconscious elements of political thought on the right. On one level, weaponized victimhood is a form of what Roberts-​Miller (2009) has termed “cunning projection.” Drawing on the work of social psychologists, Roberts-​Miller argues that cunning projection “is generally an unconscious process, and that it gets much of its power from the way that it resolves unconscious, even suppressed, anxieties”; moreover, “this cunning strategy of rhetorical projection rationalizes the bad behavior of the rhetor, in that it makes the aggressive behavior seem, at worst, defensive” (37, 39). As she explains, pro-​slavery rhetors “projected” their fears and anxieties onto their Northern abolitionist contemporaries. Roberts-​Miller’s theorization recognizes that such a rhetorical maneuver is not necessarily conscious or deliberate. Rather, projections—​such as asserting that those in marginalized positions are victimizing the privileged—​emerge out of anxieties and a desire to use language to maintain the status quo or return to a more idyllic time. Likewise, projections are not deployed to win over an oppositional group. They instead seek to establish and reinforce group identity (21, 51–​54). In projecting victimization, there is no room for middle ground; one must identify with either the oppressor or the oppressed. Examining weaponized victimhood through the lens of Roberts-​Miller moves beyond the search for a rational, conscious argument in these manifestations. Instead, one will find rhetorical moves arising out

 



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of psychological, social, and political anxieties that hold the purpose of delineating an “us” from a “them.” Today these anxieties emerge from the perceived, and at times actual, loss of power and social standing. Not only has neoliberalism brought about the decline of social wages, but also multiculturalism, feminism, and secularism are blamed for lowering social and psychological wages as well. As a discursive maneuver, weaponized victimhood functions as both a powerful rhetorical tool and an engine of ideology working to maintain privilege within systems of inequality. Ultimately, with this theoretical background established, weaponized victimhood is a practice that occupies four identifiable stages. First, there is a real or perceived challenge to the status quo or a community’s hegemonic social standing. Second, this perception triggers a sense of aggrieved entitlement. Third, people mobilize in public performances of victimhood. Fourth, this victimhood is weaponized to justify politics, policies, and social practices of oppression.4 Critically, aggrieved entitlement forges the possibility for connection across otherwise discrete elements of the Right. This is not to suggest that conservative evangelical Christians, men’s rights anti-​feminists, and white supremacists will coalesce without distinction. Rather, because they deploy a shared rhetorical structure and experience a common affective state of aggrieved entitlement, their discrete political concerns become legible across other differences and coalitions become possible.

Expressing Victimhood in Two Case Studies: A Manifesto and a Moment The weaponization of victimhood bears tremendous significance for scholars and social activists committed to social justice struggles. With some notable exceptions, US cultural studies scholars often fail to take conservative intellectual and cultural workers as serious subjects of study. As such, scholars are often caught unaware when conservatives win significant electoral, legislative, and judicial victories. The deployment of victimhood by those in positions of privilege has become a cultural dominant over the last few decades. Without coming to terms with this, scholars and activists are ill-​prepared to understand how social intransigency works. The following pages examine two case studies in which victimhood is foundational to arguments of the Right: Imran Khan’s “The Misandry Bubble” and the 2015 privilege controversy at Appalachian State University.   Thanks to Jen Schneider for helping me elucidate these stages.

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Some may think this an odd pairing: an online men’s rights manifesto and the racial backlash stemming from discussions of white privilege. These emerge in different forms and as part of distinct political projects. This seeming disconnect, however, is central to my argument. A common rhetorical maneuver, the weaponization of victimhood structures overlaps between otherwise disparate political efforts. Importantly, there is nothing natural about white supremacy and the anti-​feminism of the men’s rights movement aligning together on the political right. Until recently, they had not coalesced in part because men’s rights activists disdained both political parties. Moreover, white supremacists found men’s rights activists’ concept of masculinity to be lacking for their political vision. Men’s rights activists and white supremacists converged in 2006 during the media frenzy of the Duke lacrosse rape case, wherein an African American woman accused members of the team of raping her (Wiedeman 2017). While white supremacists saw this as a case of anti-​white news media hysteria, men’s rights activists saw the media attention operating under a logic of misandry. Both found evidence of their supposed victimization in the case itself, in the mainstream journalists’ rush to judgment, and in the eventual dismissal of the charges. Indeed, Richard Spencer and Stephen Miller, two figures associated with the alt-​right, gained media experience and their political ascendancy through the case (Wiedeman 2017). Although there is nothing predetermined about the alignment of white supremacy and anti-​feminism, the Duke case proved a critical convergence, and today the men’s rights community has become a fertile recruiting ground for white supremacy (Landsbaum 2016). Since its inception, the men’s rights movement has weaponized victimhood as a critical component of its ideology and discursive repertoire. Examining the weaponization of victimhood within an ideological and discursive community that has existed for fifty years and now spreads across media and platforms is challenging. This chapter focuses on Imran Khan’s online manifesto “The Misandry Bubble” as a representative example of how men’s rights discourse deploys victimhood. Khan’s “Misandry Bubble” is hardly unique. Indeed, Khan’s arguments about feminism and the oppression of men is endemic to men’s rights discourse. One could easily connect his ideas to earlier texts of the movement such as Richard Doyle’s The Rape of the Male (1976) and Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power (1993). Moreover, Khan’s worldview finds common ground with other, more well-​known contemporary men’s rights media figures like Daryush “Roosh V” Valizadeh and Mike Cernovich. The website VivaLaManosphere, which functions as a clearinghouse for men’s rights news and information, positions “The Misandry Bubble” as foundational reading for men seeking an introduction men’s rights issues. Although some may question the analysis of an online manifesto for a discussion of right-​oriented news media, ideological sites like Khan’s manifesto are

 



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linked within the broader online right-​wing media landscape. As Angela Nagle (2017), Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis (2017), and others have demonstrated, the advent of the Internet and participatory social media have created online communities where men’s rights activists, white supremacists, and other bearers of seemingly fringe ideologies can coalesce and organize. For men’s rights activists and other alt-​right elements, these online spaces are sources of news and commentary. Initially published on The Futurist blog, Khan’s “Misandry Bubble” has circulated online since January 1, 2010.5 Khan (2010) describes the United States in crisis with the social and economic orders facing a near collapse. According to Khan (2010), “mediocracy and tyranny” are taking root as “fairness and decorum” are becoming less common. Society has jettisoned “traditional” gender roles and relationships to transfer power and privilege to women at men’s expense. For Khan, feminism has become a dominant cultural logic. Because he believes “female oppression” to be a myth based on women’s “propensity to complain,” feminism is really no more than an excuse for full-​throated misandry. According to his logic, the rise in feminism has ushered in a cultural crisis and is fostering an economic crisis as well. Khan’s cultural thesis asserts that feminism has taught women, and society more broadly, not to respect men. The lack of respect finds expression in the culture industry, which, prior to the 1980s, had idealized images of masculinity. Today’s media depicts “businessmen as villains” and “husbands as bumbling dimwits.” Beyond popular culture, this misandry has led women to devalue and mistreat men in relationships. Typical of men’s rights discourse, Khan relies on comparisons to a primal, “essential,” and “traditional” model of gender roles. For Khan, contemporary marriage and divorce laws have positioned men as always potential victims of a “brutal tyranny,” “a second-​class citizenship,” “subjecting a man to horrors more worthy of North Korea than the U.S.” Perhaps the greatest misandric victimization is reserved for the so-​called beta males. In line with much men’s rights discourse, Khan figures beta males as embodying chivalric ideals placing women on pedestals. The rise of misandry has emasculated these men as women continually reject and leave them for “alpha men.” According to Khan and others, this is a significant betrayal by feminists because feminism has cast these beta attributes as an ideal, more enlightened masculinity. Khan also contends that rampant misandry has enabled the victimization of men in other ways that will impact the economy. Like others before him, Khan argues that men experience a “glass floor”—​a supposed complement to the “glass ceiling”—​wherein men disproportionately occupy dangerous and

  Notably, “Imran Khan” is a pseudonym for the blogger.

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low-​paying jobs. Likewise, Khan points to how more men than women are imprisoned in the United States. Relying on the fallacious assertion of gender symmetry in crime, Khan claims that the overrepresentation of men in prison illustrates both a marginalization of men and a privileging of women. Ultimately, according to Khan, this societal disregard for men leads to early death and psychological stress turned inward in the form of suicide or outward in the form of violent rampages. In toto, these experiences—​high-​risk, low-​paying jobs; imprisonment; and early death—​hinder the economy by reducing each man’s potential contribution. According to Khan, men are truly victimized by society, but the rise of feminism as a dominant cultural logic hides and thus enables this fact. As a representative example, Khan’s “Misandry Bubble” demonstrates the way in which victimhood can be foundational to constructing a worldview bent on maintaining social power and privilege. Through the victimhood of misandry, Khan establishes legitimating arguments for holding onto and seizing back male power, an argument that would be untenable without positioning men as victims first. While this online manifesto offers a rich case for unpacking victimhood discourse, it is not the only discursive location. Victimhood may be expressed and weaponized across a range of media. Another way of uncovering the workings of victimhood is to turn to specific historical flashpoints, moments of media panic wherein many news outlets focus their attention on one incident to claim and articulate victimhood. The 2015 privilege controversy at Appalachian State University serves as a useful example. In spring 2015 an adviser at one of the Appalachian State residence halls put up a bulletin board focused on raising privilege awareness. The board mixed humorous memes found on the Internet with explanations of various forms of privilege in the United States:  white privilege, male privilege, able-​bodied privilege, heterosexual privilege, and Christian privilege.6 In early March, Laurel Littler, a student who did not live in the dorm, posted images of the bulletin board and complained about its content online. On March 16, Campus Reform—​an online platform that along with The College Fix pays students to expose supposed left-​leaning politics on campus—​published an article claiming that the bulletin board was designed to “shame” students (Schallhorn 2015). Over the next few weeks similar articles appeared on The Daily Caller, College Insurrection, Fox News’ The Insider, and The Blaze. On Fox News, Elisabeth Hasselbeck interviewed Littler for her “Trouble with Schools” segment. There, Littler repeated her claim that she felt targeted by the bulletin board: “when I looked at the board I instantly felt shameful for

  In perhaps a strange irony of the Appalachian State controversy, the images chosen for the initial residence hall poster appear to be memes taken from online sites satirizing the concept of privilege. 6

 



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my heritage and my upbringing because of my life choices” (“College Dorm’s Bulletin Board” 2015). Moreover, Littler agreed with Hasselbeck that the bulletin board had “intimidated” her. Littler also claimed that since she had posted on social media and spoken to the press, she had been victimized again by cyber-​bullying (“College Dorm’s Bulletin Board” 2015). In response to the media attention, Appalachian State posted other privilege awareness bulletin boards and held fora and panel discussions across campus (Rukstuhl 2015). Seizing upon the controversy and media attention, a white supremacist organization called the National Youth Front (NYF) initiated “Operation Bully Board” (Rukstuhl 2015). Overnight, NYF members posted fliers across Appalachian State’s campus that refuted the concepts of white, Christian, and male privilege. Although the NYF campaign brought more attention, Appalachian State did not back down. In August 2016, the university posted a privilege awareness bulletin board in the Memorial Union, and the media hysteria erupted again (Hutchison 2016). The 2015 Appalachian State privilege controversy illustrates the way victimhood discourse travels across media locations as well as elements of the political Right. Distinct elements of the Right and right-​oriented media form a discourse community, with participants invested in both seeing themselves as victims and fighting back. The Appalachian State controversy and others like it reveal not just a shared discourse community invested in victimhood, but also the variety of ways that victimhood can be articulated. The two Appalachian State students who complained framed their grievances along two lines. Littler asserted that she felt the bulletin board targeted her based on her immutable identity: “I can’t help that I’m Caucasian. Will they be happy if I change the color of my skin so I don’t have my ‘white privilege’ anymore?” (Schallhorn 2015). Through this logic, Littler and other white students as well as students who bear other forms of privilege are targeted and shamed for something they have no control over. Along with Littler, another student, Mike Herbert, engaged a different yet complementary argument, contending that such conversations about privilege and social justice may be legitimate on campus but not in dorms and not when instigated by resident advisers. For Herbert, the dorm was a safe space and advisers should remain neutral (Schallhorn 2015). This assertion positions Littler and other potentially privileged students as victims in that the bulletin board targeted them in a place that should have remained off limits to social and political debate. Together, Littler and Herbert position white students as victims of shame and harassment in what should have been an otherwise safe, neutral (read: privilege-​reinforcing) space (Leonardo and Porter 2010). Right media also positioned the bulletin board within a broader conflict. For conservative commentators, the bulletin board was not a one-​time maligning of white people, Christians, and men. Rather, as pointed out by Campus Reform

 

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and Elisabeth Hasselbeck of Fox News, the bulletin board was an outgrowth of the “Check Your Privilege” campaign started by professors at the University of San Francisco (“College Dorm’s Bulletin Board” 2015; Lit 2014).7 By tying the bulletin board to the “Check Your Privilege” campaign, the victimization at Appalachian State is part of the ongoing culture wars in higher education—​just the most recent battle in which whites, males, and Christians have been targeted for shame and harassment. Indeed, in an interview with The Blaze, Campus Reform’s Kaitlyn Schallhorn connected the bulletin boards at Appalachian State to the attitudes of those who would criticize Indiana’s anti-​LBGTQ “religious freedom” law (“Kaitlyn Schallhorn” 2015). If conservative media framed Appalachian State as part of a broad liberal plot to harass and shame, the NYF took the victimization to its logical conclusion. For years in the United States and globally, neo-​Nazi, white supremacist, and white nationalist groups have argued that immigration and diversity programing constitute a “white genocide.” Common slogans such as “anti-​racist is code for anti-​white” and “diversity equals white genocide” run rampant within these discourse communities. When Campus Reform, Fox News, and others asserted victimhood via the Appalachian State bulletin board, the NYF recognized this as a battle and stepped up to defend whiteness, Christianity, and patriarchy. John Angelo Gage, then-​leader of the NYF, stated in a video: “This is a message to all the anti-​whites and all the colleges out there that the National Youth Front, Trad[itional] Youth Network and all these other groups out there are ready to work together to send a strong message to all of you that we will not allow the defamation of our people to happen without being confronted” (Thompson 2015; Oakes 2015). While Gage, the NYF, and others of his ilk fall clearly within the categories of neo-​Nazis and white nationalists, it is critical to note that he engages a “defensive” rhetoric that is enabled and legitimated by positioning whites and others bearing relative privilege as victims in an ongoing war.8 In this way, Gage and his white supremacist brethren share much in common with more mainstream right-​oriented media, and even, albeit perhaps unknowingly, with students like Laurel Littler. Moreover, while the Appalachian State media panic privileged a racial outcry, the NYF’s attention to the male privilege posters and defense of patriarchy echo the defensive logic of Khan’s “Misandry Bubble,” wherein someone must stand up for the men against the “rages” of feminism. Here, the NYF aligned themselves with men’s rights anti-​feminists because they 7   We must also note the way in which the privilege awareness campaign draws on not only the script of liberal elite college professors but also the extreme liberalism of San Francisco in the U.S. conservative political imagination. 8   Robin Dale Jacobson describes this maneuver as a “defensive bridge” that connects color-​blind and race-​realist discourses and ideologies ( Jacobson 2008, 19, 40).

 



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shared the affective state of aggrieved entitlement and the common rhetorical structure of weaponized victimhood. While Khan’s “Misandry Bubble” manifesto demonstrates how victimization sprawls within and permeates an ideology, this moment of the Appalachian State bulletin board controversy shows how victimhood may be claimed in differing ways by those who may not see themselves as ideologically part of a collective effort. Conservative media outcry hinged upon the authority and complaints of two offended students. Likewise, the students and conservative media give a cloak of mainstream legitimacy to white supremacist groups like the NYF, suggesting that their concerns and worldviews are not fringe but commonplace among aggrieved whites.9 Although the NYF and other white supremacists gain legitimacy by latching onto more mainstream assertions of victimhood, conservative media and the students strengthen their legitimacy by not embracing or engaging explicit articulations of white supremacy. This allows students and conservative media to occupy a position of mainstream “reasonability” in contrast to fringe-​oriented white supremacists (for more on the history of conservative respectability politics around race, see Greene, this volume).10 Understanding the way victimhood discourse underwrites and mobilizes communities who may not see themselves in common or ideologically aligned explains why this weaponization is so effective.

Victimhood Weaponized: Three Realms of Maintaining Privilege To many, particularly scholars in the humanities and social sciences, these assertions of victimhood—​white, male, Christian, and otherwise—​may appear ludicrous. Many of these beliefs are demonstrably false or rely on obvious logical fallacies. Despite the fallacious nature of these victimhood claims, scholars and activists must treat this discursive practice seriously because it can pay significant ideological and political dividends. These dividends take shape across three distinct yet interrelated realms. First, in a discursive/​ideological realm, assertions of victimhood function to flatten out or invert social hierarchies

  Adam Klein demonstrates that white supremacist activists moderate their messages to make racism acceptable to mainstream media. Here, I am contending that an inversion is also at play where mainstream rhetors give cover to white supremacy (and antifeminism) (Klein 2012). 10   As Nagle and others have rightly noted, purposeful deployments of extreme rhetoric may be seen as manipulating the “Overton window” (Nagle 2017, 41). Articulating unthinkable positions shifts the range of possible public discourse and allows presumably radical rhetoric to seem acceptable, sensible, or popular. 9

 

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and make them illegible. This strategic obfuscation operates through the following logic: the oppressed are not really oppressed, but if they are, the privileged are oppressed in equal or greater ways; therefore, any emphasis on social transformation should be aimed at decreasing the marginalization of the privileged. While this may appear incoherent in the abstract, consider how this logical structure underwrites the claims to victimhood in specific cases. The 2015 Starbucks Christmas cup kerfuffle rendered Christians as victims and occluded the fact that other religious and nonreligious identities rarely receive elevated commercial or social standing in the United States. Here victimization did not signal marginalization, denigration, or oppression, but a loss of assumed status and power. Likewise, when Fox News frames white students as victims of privilege awareness campaigns, they obscure the very real disadvantages experienced by communities of color, flattening out and then inverting racial power dynamics so that they position whites as oppressed as much as, if not more than, students of color. Similarly, Khan’s manifesto and other antifeminist pieces position women as false victims in comparison to a true victimization of men. Moreover, his “Misandry Bubble” reveals the discursive and ideological end game for these claims of victimization, for Khan (2010) asserts the need for patriarchy to achieve a balance between the sexes: “Patriarchy works because it induces men and women to cooperate under their complementary strengths. ‘Feminism’ does not work, because it encourages immoral behavior in women, which eventually wears down even the durable chivalry of beta men, making both genders worse off.” One can imagine a similar argument extending out of the War on Christmas or white privilege controversies wherein systems of inequality are seen as neutral from the viewpoints of those who most benefit from them. Andrea Smith and other critical ethnic studies scholars have warned against aggrieved communities competing in an “oppression Olympics,” for doing so only reinforces systems of power (Smith 2006). Here, those in positions of relative power and privilege also compete in the oppression Olympics, and doing so allows them to nullify and blind themselves to the experiences of others. Exploring this use of victimization within a discursive and ideological realm exposes how language shapes and limits the contours of human thought. Social systems of power and inequality are rendered natural, rational, and unrecognizable to their beneficiaries (Mills 1997, 18). Critically, this weaponization of victimhood closes off potential alliances. For example, while men can make many legitimate grievances—​such as their historical expectations to serve in the military and other high-​risk professions—​the root causes of such issues are more accurately attributed to hegemonic notions of masculinity and economic exploitation and not the mythic rise of radical feminism. Indeed, 1970s women’s liberation and men’s liberation agreed on the belief that patriarchy victimized both women and men, albeit in different ways (Kimmel 2013, 103–​104). A key

 



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difference is that men are not only victims but also the beneficiaries of patriarchy. As such, men’s rights discourse denies oppression at the hands of patriarchy and claims victimization at the hands of feminism and feminists. Beyond, yet intricately connected to, the discursive and ideological realm, victimhood is weaponized through its manifestation within a psychoaffective realm, giving language to felt experience and forming individual and collective identities. These assertions of victimhood are verbal expressions of what Michael Kimmel (2013) has called “aggrieved entitlement” (xiv, 24). Kimmel explains that aggrieved entitlement is the feeling of loss and grievance when systems that ensure one’s privilege have started to erode. For those in positions of privilege, the fruits of privilege feel like they were earned through merit (xii–​ xiv). When social inequality is addressed, even incompletely, those in positions of privilege may feel oppressed. Kimmel’s framework makes particular sense when placed in conversation with the “wages of whiteness” first explored by W.  E. B.  DuBois and extrapolated by David Roediger. According to DuBois, working-​class whites during reconstruction received not just economic benefits but social and psychological wages for distinguishing themselves from Black people (DuBois 1998, 700; Roediger 1999). In essence, social privileges paid psychological wages. Working-​class whites could see themselves as superior to their laboring brothers and sisters, a psychological wage that made up for their own economic exploitation and secured a cross-​class alliance with elite whites (Olson 2004, 16–​17). Today, with the social transformation spurred by multiple liberation struggles and, as Mike King has noted, the rise of neoliberalism, these psychological wages have “served as a safety net” for those in positions of relative privilege (King 2017). Placing Kimmell, DuBois, Roediger, and King in conversation, one finds analogous systems of power. Men in patriarchy experience psychological wages as do whites living in white supremacy. When those systems undergo crisis, those in relative power express aggrieved entitlement. They feel victimized at the perceived loss of unearned privilege. In contrast to the psychological wages explored by DuBois and Roediger, aggrieved entitlement becomes a wage for those who feel they have lost social status. In this way, victimhood forges identity. This framework exposes the psychoaffective dynamic behind anti-​feminist, white supremacist, and other fallacious assertions of victimhood. Khan and others may claim that women are unfairly privileged in hiring and promotion, are given the benefit of the doubt in sexual assault and domestic violence cases, and fail to become committed partners with chivalrous gentlemen. Campus Reform and Fox News may assert that white students undergo daily psychological assaults on campus. Allan Bakke and Abigail Fisher may assert that they did not get into their most desired school because of people of color. White supremacist groups may see diversity programming as an ongoing “white genocide.” Clearly

 

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these claims are questionable at best. However, they do not have to be empirically true. What matters is that they feel true. Weaponized victimhood allows for the expression of grievance even when there really is not one. And weaponized victimhood pays the psychological wage of exploring why one’s own struggles are the fault of others. Critically, at the psychoaffective level, claims of victimhood are more than expressions that let off steam of grievance. These expressions are crucial in manifesting and maintaining individual and collective identities. Anti-​feminists like Khan imagine and assert what it is like to be a man during the rise of feminist hegemony. White supremacists claim a white racial identity in the looming face of diversity and multiculturalism. Evangelical Christians declare their righteousness through their persecution in an increasingly secular and diversely religious society. These assertions of victimhood, however, provide a sense of identity for more than the rhetors themselves. These expressions interpellate audiences and may suggest imagined community.11 This identity and community does not just form in the theoretical sense. Consider the following online responses to Khan’s manifesto: Man and boy should be directed to read these revelations and if need be, tattooed on their privates so as to avoid being victimized by the gov’t and officers of the court that must find the source of masculine productivity to first disparage and then exploit and ultimately destroy. (red pill 2010) I meet so many profoundly miserable married men, and I used to be one of them, so I’ll never go back. If we want to change this, the first step IMO would be to break the legal monopoly. Lawyers make the laws, lawyers judge the cases, lawyers prosecute the citizenry, and we’re forced to hire one to defend ourselves. How is that not a racket? How is that not a monopoly? Why is it not illegal for lawyers to serve as judges and legislators? [ . . . ] That is insane and it is culturally suicidal. (Hucbald 2010) Here, the victimization and other rhetorical maneuvers espoused by Khan develop and reinforce a men’s rights consciousness in the minds of his readers. Moreover, the movement of the Appalachian State controversy across different points in a discursive community evidences a similar psychoaffective impact.   Here, I am drawing upon Althusser’s notion of interpellation via Ideological State Apparatuses and Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” created through textual reading experiences (Althusser 2001; Anderson 1991). 11

 



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Even if a misandrist, multicultural, or secularist dystopia exists only in their minds, they can imagine it into existence and express a “besieged solidarity” together. As George Lipsitz (2006) has suggested in his analysis of 1990s nativism, the identity and psychological wage accrued through this sense of “besieged solidarity” may be just as valuable as any social or political victory (50). In its most visible and potentially dangerous form, this faux victimhood can be weaponized to mobilize attacks on the marginalized and the social apparatuses that support them. This weaponization takes place in a sociopolitical realm. Here victimhood is deployed to directly impact the lives of others either through formal, legal approaches or though less formal, extra-​legal means. Lawsuits and legislation embody the most formal approaches to using victimhood for sociopolitical gain. For example, men’s rights groups have engaged in numerous lawsuits to eliminate what they see as the privileging of women and the victimization of men. In 2002, a group of men’s rights activists sued the state of Minnesota to eliminate women’s shelters (i.e., Booth v. Hvass). The plaintiffs contended that men were equally likely to be victims of domestic violence and that the state ignored this and discriminated against male abuse victims. The objective was not to secure protection for men but to eliminate services used by women (Dragiewicz 2011, 3, 28). Although this lawsuit failed, others have been successful. Over the last four decades, there have been many lawsuits regarding “ladies’ nights” at bars and nightclubs. These cases argue gender-​based price discrimination, and many of the lawsuits have been successful (Bacon 2007). These lawsuits find an eerie parallel in anti-​affirmative action cases wherein plaintiffs like Alan Bakke and Abigail Fisher contend that they have been victims of racial discrimination. Whether turning on the axis of race or gender, these examples illustrate how positions of relative privilege are recast as victimhood, pushing for the maintenance of racial and gendered hierarchies. Sometimes these assertions of victimhood find legislative sponsorship. Arizona’ s 2010 anti-​ethnic studies law (HB 2281)  was advocated by conservative lawmakers and commentators who claimed that the field of Mexican American studies taught high school students to hate white people. Whether successful or not, this litigious and legislative weaponization feeds back upon and reinforces a sense of individual and collective identity based on perceived victimization. This victimhood may also be weaponized through harassment campaigns and other extra-​legal means. Here, the Gamergate controversy serves as a well-​ known example. In 2014 video game developer Zoë Quinn was accused by her former boyfriend of having an inappropriate relationship with a journalist. This post signaled to anti-​feminist gamers that the attention to Quinn’s Depression Quest game was due to her gender. Thus began a harassment campaign that targeted Quinn, fellow game developer Brianna Wu, critic Anita Sarkeesian, and

 

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other women. Moreover, numerous ethnic studies scholars have been attacked in similar ways (Hoft 2015; Jaschik 2016; Flaherty 2017). This harassment involves more than online threats and hate mail. As in the case of Gamergate and many of the professors under attack, this mobilized harassment often takes the form of doxing, death threats, false 911 calls, threatening visits to one’s home, and, in the case of targeted women, threats of rape. The objective of these efforts is more than harassment for the joy of making the target’s life miserable, a psychoaffective wage. Rather, the harassment also seeks a sociopolitical gain, making it so that the target and other like-​minded individuals will retreat from the public sphere. Of critical importance, more than just extreme behaviors, these tactics are underwritten by a belief in victimhood. Those doing the harassing do so while claiming that they have somehow been wronged. Mapping how victimhood is weaponized across three realms illustrates their discrete workings as well as how each realm feeds off of and reinforces others. Moreover, this mapping suggests how disparate incidents and seemingly fringe tactics are underwritten by a dominant cultural logic on the right. Seeing oneself as a victim is a crucial thread that weaves these ideologies, identities, and historical moments together. As scholars become aware of this thread, the broader pattern of behavior and thought becomes legible.

Conclusion This chapter has examined how seemingly discrete elements of the Right—​ anti-​feminism, white supremacy, and conservative evangelical Christianity—​ weaponize victimhood for the maintenance of social hierarchy and relative forms of privilege. This pairing exposes a common pattern of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors underwritten and structured by a victimization frame. Weaponized victimhood is a new manifestation of an old phenomenon. In the vein of Hofstadter’s paranoid style and Rogin’s countersubversive tradition, weaponized victimhood organizes a political community against a common enemy that threatens the nation and its way of life. Critically, however, this dominant cultural logic does not solely reside and thrive on the moderate and extreme right. A sense of victimhood and this framing may find fertile soil in political moderates and those on the left, for anyone with a potential for a perceived loss of privilege is vulnerable to the feelings of aggrieved entitlement. Weaponized victimhood seizes these feelings and anxieties of a hierarchal social order in tumult and transforms them into ideology, identity, and mobilization. Those who benefit from white supremacy, patriarchy, or Christian hegemony in the United States are susceptible to the seductive power of the victim frame, whether they consciously identify with the Right or not.

 



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Understanding the dynamics of weaponized victimhood allows scholars of conservative media and politics to make sense of these seemingly disparate assertions of victimization. These are not isolated incidents or mere moments of fringe paranoia. Rather, they are part of a broad-​ranging political, rhetorical, and affective project, and scholars must map these formulations. In an era when the “race card,” the “woman card,” “snowflake,” and “triggered” are popularly associated with aggrieved communities and the political Left, these assertions obscure right-​oriented investments in identity politics, the rhetoric of victimhood, and systems of social inequality.

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Jaschik, Scott. 2016. “Against Bullying.” Inside Higher Ed, February 15. “Kaitlyn Schallhorn Joins The Blaze’s Dana Loesch to Discuss ‘Christian Privilege’ Bulletin Boards.” 2015. Campus Reform, April 2. Khan, Imran. 2010. “The Misandry Bubble.” The Futurist, January 1. http://​singularity2050.com/​ 2010/​01/​the-​misandry-​bubble.html. Kimmel, Michael. 2013. Angry White Men:  American Masculinity at the End of an Era. New York: Nation Books. King, Mike. 2017. “Aggrieved Whiteness: White Identity Politics and Modern American Racial Formation.” Abolition:  A Journal of Insurgent Politics, May 4.  https://​abolitionjournal.org/​ aggrieved-​whiteness-​white-​identity-​politics-​and-​modern-​american-​racial-​formation/​. Klein, Adam. 2012. “Slipping Racism into the Mainstream: A Theory of Information Laundering.” Communication Theory 22 (4): 427–​448. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 2003 [1980]. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Landsbaum, Claire. 2016. “Men’s Rights Activists Are Finding a New Home with the Alt-​Right.” New  York Magazine, December 14. https://​www.thecut.com/​2016/​12/​mens-​rights-​ activists-​are-​flocking-​to-​the-​Alt-​Right.html Leonardo, Zeus, and Ronald K. Porter. 2010. “Pedagogy of Fear: Toward a Fanonian Theory of ‘Safety’ in Race Dialogue.” Race, Ethnicity, and Education 13 (2): 139–​157. Lipsitz, George. 2006. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Rev. and expanded ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lit, Maggie. 2014. “University Professors Attack White, Heterosexual, Christian Males for Being ‘Privileged.’” Campus Reform, November 7. Marwick, Alice, and Rebecca Lewis. 2017. “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online.” Data & Society Research Institute, January 5. Mills, Charles. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Nagle, Angela. 2017. Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-​ Right and Trump. Washington, DC: Zero Books. Oakes, Anna. 2015. “White Nationalists Target ASU” Watauga Democrat, April 16. http://​www. wataugademocrat.com/​news/​white-​nationalists-​target-​asu/​article_​fe662d7c-​e476-​11e4-​ 872d-​13c9be202ed0.html. Olson, Joel. 2004. The Abolition of White Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. O’Reilly, Bill. 2016. “War on Christmas Won by the Good Guys, but Insurgents Remain.” Fox News, December 15. Planas, Roque. 2015. “Fox News Raises Alarm Over College Course About Race.” Huffington Post, January 24. red pill. 2010. “‘The Misandry Bubble’ Comments Section.” The Futurist, January 2 at 1:16 pm. Roberts-​Miller, Patricia. 2009. Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Roediger, David. 1999. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Rev. ed. New York: Verso. Rogin, Michael Paul. 1987. Ronald Reagan, the Movie: and Other Episodes in Political Demonology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rukstuhl, Laney. 2015. “White Nationalist Group ‘Defends’ White Privilege.” The Appalachian, April 15. Schallhorn, Kaitlyn. 2015. “App State Dorm Bulletin Board Shames ‘Privileged’ Students.” Campus Reform, March 16. Smith, Andrea. 2006. “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing.” In INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, 66–​73. Boston: South End Press. Taylor, Sarah. 2017. “Rush Limbaugh: ‘Feminazis’ to Blame for Confusion of Traditional Gender Roles.” The Blaze, July 17.

 



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Thompson, Catherine. 2015. “How the Great White Freakout Just Got Unleashed at Another University.” Talking Points Memo, April 24. Whitten, Sarah. 2015. “Is Starbucks Waging ‘War on Christmas’? Red Cup Stirs Controversy.” NBC News, November 10. Wiedeman, Reeves. 2017. “The Duke Lacrosse Scandal and the Birth of the Alt-​Right.” New York Magazine, April 14. http://​nymag.com/​daily/​intelligencer/​2017/​04/​the-​duke-​lacrosse-​ scandal-​and-​the-​birth-​of-​the-​Alt-​Right.html. Wilson. 2013. “Texas Ends ‘the War on Christmas.’” GlennBeck.com, November 26. Winant, Howard. 2004. The New Politics of Race:  Globalism, Difference, Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

 

5

NRA Media and Second Amendment Identity Politics Dawn R . Gilpin

Gun ownership and security has risen to the forefront of public discourse in the United States in recent years, due primarily to high-​profile mass shootings at schools and other public places and the perceived influence of gun lobbyists in electoral politics. The political and social climate in the United States surrounding the topic of gun ownership has grown highly contentious. Tensions over interpretations of the Second Amendment, which ensures “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” have caused social rifts and led to battles over proposed gun-​related legislation. Public discourse on the issue has increasingly configured gun ownership as an immutable identity trait rather than a freely chosen pastime or behavior (Collins 2014). The National Rifle Association (NRA) plays a pivotal role in mediating gun-​related issues. According to its website, the organization now boasts “nearly five million members”; it has positioned itself as the central advocate for protection of gun ownership and the unrestricted availability of firearms for sports, hunting, and personal defense. This position places the organization at the intersection of American gun owners and enthusiasts, law enforcement and military personnel, elected officials and policymakers, and the public at large. In a climate of heightened partisanship, the organization has also become closely aligned with the conservative movement, and the Republican Party more generally (Melzer 2009), constructing the NRA as a hybrid between a politically mobilized special interest group and a social movement (Melzer 2009; Patrick 2013). Over the past decade in particular, the NRA has expanded its communication platforms from a range of magazines for hobbyists and collectors to include dozens of social media accounts across multiple platforms and its own streaming television channels. Collectively these constitute a mediasphere that plays a key role in constructing and reinforcing people’s social and political identities as gun 84

 



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owners, with significant implications for both culture and politics in the United States. In this chapter, I examine the nature of that sociopolitical identity construction through close analysis of NRA media.

The NRA and Its Mediasphere The NRA may be characterized as a complex organization that fits into the trend of hybridity as described by Chadwick (2013). It is simultaneously a politically active lobbying group, trade association, hobbyist club, lifestyle company, and now media producer. Lowndes (2008) observed that “it is in and through politics that interests, grievances, and passions are forged and new collective identities created” (4). Since the early 2000s, the NRA has taken advantage of increased hypermediacy to constitute, expand, consolidate, and network its power; these same qualities of hybridity and hypermediacy shape the specific ways in which the organization has mobilized the interests and grievances of gun owners to construct Second Amendment advocacy as a collective political identity. In the media realm, hybridization refers to the process by which existing and recognizably defined genres of practice, institutional forms, language, and technologies recombine in new ways (Chadwick 2013). These new combinations may emerge suddenly or gradually, and may involve varying degrees of disruption to the status quo. It “is therefore a process of simultaneous integration and fragmentation” (15) where outcomes are never fully stabilized but remain in flux. Once-​separate discursive realms such as politics, entertainment, news, and marketing have “melded into previously unimagined combinations” (Baym 2005, 262). New genres are continually being formed, also in keeping with shifts in technology and culture. Chadwick (2013) noted that “older organizational forms—​political parties and interest groups—​now blend together their own pre-​existing campaigning styles with mobilization repertoires typically associated with social movement organizations” (15). Over fifteen years ago, Brian Patrick (2013) observed the hybridization of the NRA from an interest group into a mobilizing social movement with institutionalized structures and financial support. In more recent times, it has further evolved into a media producer that can further amplify the organization’s messages while simultaneously taking powerful advantage of an existing network of right-​wing media and their audiences (see DiBranco, this volume; Hemmer 2016). The history of the NRA’s evolution into a media producer is reminiscent of Chadwick’s (2013) observation that in many cases hybridity is “a heavily politicized and competitive process of interaction at critical historical junctions as

 

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groups engage in struggle to assert their power and autonomy” (12). Modern conservative (or “Americanist”) publications and programming first emerged during the post–​World War II period through the efforts of “media activists” determined to present a point of view they felt was missing from mainstream news coverage (Hemmer 2016). Hemmer observed that these early media activists believed that all institutions are inherently ideological, and that ideological consistency should be valued over claims of journalistic objectivity. They therefore created outlets that would offer news and analysis from a proudly biased tradition that they felt was more inherently truthful than traditional media. The NRA has long been politically embedded in the conservative movement, with prominent members of the American Conservative Union serving on its board of directors and as officers, and vice versa (Melzer 2009). This was the media tradition from which the NRA mediasphere emerged. In 2002, Patrick argued that the NRA had benefited from what he referred to as “anti-​media theory,” mobilizing members not despite, but thanks to, negative coverage by mass media outlets, able “to recognize, nourish, stimulate, simulate, exploit and attempt to manage” profound cultural and class rifts in US culture (10). Shortly thereafter, however, NRA leadership decided to go a step further and become the media. In 2004, Fox News ran an Associated Press story announcing that the NRA was planning to launch its own news organization in an effort “to bring back the First Amendment.” Wayne LaPierre, already the executive vice president, explained that the goal was to develop into a “ ‘legitimate packager of news’ like newspapers and TV networks.” According to the article, the NRA felt too constrained by campaign finance laws and wanted to be able to take advantage of “soft money” funding for issue messaging and candidate support. LaPierre claimed that “if you own the news operation, you can say whatever you want. If you don’t, you’re gagged.” The NRA had been publishing print magazines and newsletters for decades, but this announcement marked the start of a new chapter. The new media organization began with a single online talk show, Cam & Co. (still part of its lineup), with the goal of eventually expanding into radio and television. As of this writing, the NRA offers an assortment of print and electronic publications. Members may choose from among four print magazine subscriptions: American Rifleman, American Hunter, America’s 1st Freedom, and Shooting Illustrated. Shooting Sports USA and NRA Family are online-​only publications, which also offer email newsletters. Social media users can choose from among thirteen Twitter accounts and the same number of Facebook pages, ten Instagram feeds, five Pinterest accounts, a multimedia blog, a Tumblr, and two Snapchats. They can also watch seven different YouTube channels, some of which offer duplicate programming of NRATV, which launched in 2016. A grand total

 



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of thirty-​nine programs are currently available on the latter (accessible via Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire, Sirius XM, and other means, as well as online). Ads on NRA.org regularly announce upcoming launches of new programs, exhibiting dynamic growth within the NRA mediasphere. Through interviews, guest authors, and mutual linking, NRA media have embedded themselves within the broader network of right-​wing and conservative outlets that have, since the mid-​twentieth century, offered an alternative epistemological system. The labyrinthine path of the organization across various print, online, social, and streaming media reflect the peculiarly hybrid nature of the NRA mediasphere. All of these paths, however, can be traced back to NRA. org, which is configured as both an institutional website and the hub of the organization’s news operations.

Right-​Wing and Populist Discourse Before analyzing the content of NRA media, it is useful to briefly review some existing scholarship on right-​wing and conservative discourse, media, and identities. This chapter adopts the perspective that populism is a style of expression and political identity that may be used to articulate a range of ideological views (De Cleen, Glynos, and Mondon 2018; Meléndez and Kaltwasser 2017; Ostiguy 2017). Populism can be said to exhibit several recurring discursive features: most notably, favorably centering “the people” as a homogeneous community; antagonism toward one or more “Others”; and relational distancing between the two (Lowndes 2017; Wodak 2013). Rhetorically, this distancing often takes an aggressive or mocking tone that Pierre Ostiguy (2017) described as expressing the “combative pleasure principle” (240). Joseph Lowndes (2017) also observed that populism favors the “fantasy of politics as direct and personal” (242). Such a direct approach lends itself well to an era of social media and talk show–​style programs that can offer personal appeal. This trend also fits with Ostiguy’s (2017) characterization of populism as a highly relational phenomenon, one that emerges both between constituents and leaders and between these and their constituted antagonistic Other. Political organizations can therefore take advantage of new modes of information delivery to reinforce their populist messaging. Conservative media turned to populism in the mid-​twentieth century as they sought supporters, and found that populism “allowed them to build a bridge between conservative elites and ordinary Americans based on their shared experience of exclusions” (Hemmer 2016, xiv). Power dynamics in right-​wing discourse center around the fight against encroaching institutional or cultural forces seen as threatening the traditional

 

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family, conservative moral values, or the homogeneity of the community and its traditions (De Cleen 2018; Lakoff 2006; Lowndes 2017; Wodak 2015). This reactionary threat modality may be engaged even to defend dubious historical claims (De Cleen 2018). The accompanying rhetoric often employs nostalgic appeals to “the good old days,” “taking our country back,” and similar notions of what Lowndes (2017) dubbed “melancholia.” More autocratic forms of authoritarianism may focus on the need for law enforcement, military force, or even violent uprisings (Harrison and Bruter 2011), but in the United States, the emphasis tends instead to reassert strong patriarchal, masculinist, and white supremacist values, even when couched in language drawn from progressive movements (De Cleen et al. 2018; Lowndes 2008). Lowndes (2008, 2017) noted that in the United States, conservative populist positions have traditionally carried elements of whiteness and masculinity alongside antagonism toward the state, such that the Others tended to be predominantly people of color, women, government actors, and those in favor of increasing the power and influence of these outgroups. Whereas a patriarchal worldview has been identified as fundamental to right-​wing political discourse in numerous contexts (Harrison and Bruter 2011; Lakoff 2006), in the contemporary American Right it is typically expressed as individualistic, anti-​government sentiments “not just through race, populism, and economic conservatism but also through the selective appropriation of antiracist, Left, and countercultural themes” (Lowndes 2008, 9). For example, the NRA frequently refers to itself as a “civil rights organization” (e.g., “Morse: Left Started War on NRA,” Cam & Co., October 26, 2017). We might therefore summarize the populist style of conservative discourse as asserting a homogeneous community whose familial and moral values, traditions, and practices are threatened by government and other institutions, powerful elites, and/​or cultural Others. The “people” addressed are characterized as unrightfully disempowered and in need of mobilizing to defend their besieged way of life, and interlocutors frequently employ dramatic, aggressive, or mocking language.

Data and Methods When a visitor arrives at NRA.org, the bulk of the initial browser screen is occupied by a rotating series of “hero” images with links to various subsites and NRATV programming segments, in a lineup that changes every weekday. This curated lineup serves to highlight key themes and present those segments, stories, and topics that the organization wishes to draw visitors’ attention to at a

 



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particular moment in time. The daily linked media may therefore be considered akin to front-​page stories in a newspaper. Like front-​page headlines, they reflect what the organization values and considers newsworthy. Beginning in June 2017—​immediately following the congressional baseball practice shooting in Alexandria, Virginia—​I catalogued these headline images daily, along with the linked content and descriptive blurbs (Shear, Goldman, and Cochrane 2017). Between June 14, 2017, and February 28, 2018, a total of 630 media elements were featured on the front page of the site. These primarily included video segments from NRATV channels, online news items from subsites such as the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) and America’s First Freedom, and promotions for NRA products, services, and events. These media products formed the foundation of this chapter’s discursive analysis.

Analytical Methods In what follows I employ a discursive approach, one that is especially useful for investigating complex identity construction processes since it entails identifying how social actors are produced by way of the social actions they commit, making it possible to explore power dynamics and the ways in which social relations are organized (Wodak and Meyer 2009). For this study I drew heavily on the techniques of critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Fairclough 2001, 2013; Wodak and Meyer 2009). CDA regards power dynamics as fundamentally systemic, expressed through communicative action but often in a manner that obscures the ways in which it exercises control. It also prioritizes studying discourse as a historically and socioculturally situated phenomenon (Wodak and Meyer 2009). From a methodological standpoint, CDA involves three broad stages: description, interpretation, and contextual explanation of the discursive content under analysis (Fairclough 2013). These stages are fundamentally and conceptually interdependent, so the analysis that follows approaches them holistically, moving from structure to content to broader context and back again, as appropriate. My analysis was immersive: throughout the archiving period, each headline artifact was catalogued daily, along with notes on the subject matter, style, and actors involved in each. Iterative review made it possible to identify emergent themes, which in subsequent passages were organized and collapsed into a set of consistent principles that characterize the overall political identity framework set forth by NRA media.

 

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Analysis In keeping with the CDA approach, the first section that follows examines the descriptive features of the NRA mediasphere as represented by the curated front page, beginning with the sources and structures of the front-​page headlines. The subsequent sections then interrogate ways in which the content builds on those structures to establish and expand a particular form of right-​wing discourse constitutive of a Second Amendment–​based political identity.

Structure of NRA Front-​Page Media As noted earlier, each weekday the main block of the NRA.org front page displays a horizontal scroll of selected media, almost exclusively sourced from the organization’s various subsites and divisions. Before attending to the content of the images, videos, and articles showcased, it is worth taking the time to understand the sources and kinds of media they represent. Table 5.1 summarizes the media sources that provided front-​page material during the period in question, which stretched from immediately following the congressional baseball practice shooting in June 2017 to two weeks after the 2018 Valentine’s Day gun massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, during which seventeen students and teachers were killed (Chuck, Johnson, and Siemaszko 2018). The table makes clear that not all NRA media are created equal when it comes to the front page. The most consistently featured sources are the daily NRATV programs Cam & Co. and Stinchfield, and the “news” page of the ILA, the organization’s political lobbying arm. Frequent appearances were also made by the online edition of the magazine America’s 1st Freedom; the short-​lived NRATV program Bill Whittle’s Hot Mic (which ended in late 2017); and a newer NRATV show, Carry Guard Daily, produced under the auspices of the NRA Carry Guard firearm training and insurance program. Media sources identified as “General” refer to promotions for NRA products, services, and events, such as their annual meetings, sweepstakes, and branded apparel. Also worth noting is what is missing from these headlines:  social media. Despite the organization’s enthusiastic embrace of these platforms with over forty social accounts, they do not figure among the featured media. In this way the website presents itself more like a traditional news site, displaying headlines from a variety of coverage areas, than an organization seeking to actively engage with current and potential members. Dialogue is not foregrounded. Nearly all of the featured media come from within the NRA mediasphere, as may be expected from a production company. However, Table 5.2 also indicates

 

Table 5.1  S ources of NRA Front-​Page Headlines, mid-​June 2017 to February 28, 2018 2017 Media Source

2018

Jun* Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Total

America’s 1st Freedom

9

14

18

13

Bill Whittle’s Hot Mic

5

15

19

6

Cam & Co

7

20

21

17

9

4

1

4

2

72

2

45 14

19

Carry Guard Daily Commentators

3

1

14

20

13

145

2

20

10

32

1

10

1

Face the Nation

1

1

Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace

1

1

Freedom’s Safest Place

2

Frontlines

2

General

8

Ginny Simone Reporting

1

2 2

1

1

2

1

1

1

1

1

1

Hannity ILA

1 2

4

5

16

14

11

13

1 8

18

14

9

Love at First Shot

1

1 1

108 1

1

Noir

22 6

1

1

Justice with Judge Jeanine

NRA Hunting

6

1 1

3

3

4

10

2

1

1

NRATV

1

2

1

8

12

Patriot Profiles

1

1

Sessions

1

1

Stinchfield

9

18

This Is My Cause

20

18

14

18

15

20

1

1

Wayne LaPierre

1

1

Women’s Leadership Forum 48

90

98

147 1

1

Tucker Carlson Tonight

Total

15

72

60

58

Shading indicates sources external to NRA media. *Data collection began on June 14, so the monthly totals are partial.

60 82

1

1

62

630

 

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five external items that were linked on the front page, all in October 2017. These were appearances on mainstream and right-​wing news programs and talk shows by NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre and ILA executive director Chris W. Cox a few days after the Las Vegas shooting where fifty-​eight people were killed and more than five hundred injured (Wamsley 2017). NRATV is by far the dominant presence. While this may be expected, with thirty-​nine channels to promote, the four mentioned previously figure most prominently. Five shows make only single appearances (Love at First Shot, Patriot Profiles, Sessions, This Is My Cause, and Wayne LaPierre). Freedom’s Safest Place is a “channel” devoted to institutional advertisements, usually short and narrated by a prominent spokesperson; three of these were highlighted on the front page. The middle ground is occupied by Commentators, which produces scripted speeches by NRA spokespeople; Ginny Simone Reporting, which promises in-​ depth reportage; Noir, hosted by Colion Noir; and a range of media produced under the general NRATV banner. Only America’s 1st Freedom and the ILA news are predominantly text based.

Negotiating Structural Intersectionality Some of these curatorial choices reflect ways in which the NRA struggles to present itself and remain relevant in a changing social context. Part of the process of constructing a cultural and political identity centered around gun rights involves negotiating intersectional realities with other identities, including race and gender. Melzer (2009) described one of the core beliefs of the NRA as “frontier masculinity,” which highlights the organization’s traditionally gendered orientation. In the 1990s, faced with declining overall membership alongside what Mary Zeiss Stange and Carol Oyster (2000) referred to as “the decade of the gun woman” (23), the NRA began to actively court women. It even named its first female president, Marion Hammer, who served from 1996 to 1998, and the first executive director of the ILA, Tanya Metaska, held office from 1994 to 1998 (Floyd 2008). Continued outreach is reflected in some of today’s NRA media offerings. Love at First Shot, for example, is part of the “NRA Women’s Network” (http://​ www.nrawomen.tv/​) and listed among the “women’s interests” linked from the organization’s main website navigation (https://​explore.nra.org/​interests/​ womens-​interests/​). The existence of this category and network highlights the organization’s systematic effort to attract more women to gun ownership and shooting. There is no “Black Network” or interest category in the site menu for people of color. While in and of itself this may seem an anodyne omission, from a critical discourse perspective we cannot ignore the broader social and historical

 



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context in which the NRA is operating. Lunceford (2015) pointed out that questions of race represent “the elephant in the room regarding Second Amendment discourse; race has serious implications for how individuals can exercise their Second Amendment rights” (337). Historically, federal and local gun controls have operated to systematically exclude African Americans from owning guns, from enslaved people to freedmen to minority communities in general in the wake of civil rights activism (Winkler 2011). The NRA does not provide public data about its membership broken down by race, so there is no reliable way of knowing the figures. However, Noir is the only NRATV program hosted by an African American. Colion Noir (born Collins) began his media career discussing firearms, politics, and culture on YouTube, and was later hired by the NRA to become part of their regular stable (Hennessy-​Fiske 2013). He is also a frequent narrator for the Commentators series and guest on other programs. The NRA has chosen to pursue women and black members through its media offerings, but it is employing different strategies for each. Creating a dedicated area that includes multiple dedicated NRATV programs—​in addition to Love at First Shot, the women’s lineup offers Armed & Fabulous (featuring “the inspiring women of the NRA Women’s Leadership Forum”), Empower the People (which follows the journey of “rape survivor and Second Amendment advocate Kimberly Corban”), and a show about up-​and-​coming stars in women’s shooting sports titled New Energy—​sends an explicit message of encouragement to current and prospective female members. The same kind of explicit invitation is not extended to people of color, who may already feel disenfranchised by the complicated perceptions and real risks surrounding firearms for nonwhite individuals. Black Lives Matter is derided as a George Soros–​funded organization “taking on extreme leftist issues that have nothing to do with the original purpose of #BlackLivesMatter” (“Who Fights for Black Rights?,” Noir, July 13, 2017). In his address to the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre railed against protestors “from the Occupy Movement to Black Lives Matter to Antifa. They agitate the offended, promote uncivil discourse and ignore any sense of due process and fairness to destroy their enemies” (February 21, 2018). Yet the NRA media occasionally host guests, and even guest commentators, of color such as conservative YouTubers Diamond and Silk (“YouTube Censors Content,” Stinchfield, August 22, 2017), or campus carry advocate Antonia Okafor (“The Fake Feminist Women’s March,” Commentators, July 13, 2017; “Campus Carry Debate,” Bill Whittle’s Hot Mic, August 9, 2017). They also promote the message that gun control advocates are racist and damaging, despite their socially progressive claims. For example, Cam Edwards and his guest,

 

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director of the conservative think tank Independence Institute Dave Kopel, stated that “guns protect Americans from white supremacists, while gun control laws protect white supremacists” (“The Racist Roots of Gun Control,” Cam & Co., August 23, 2017). These may be seen as examples of the phenomenon Melzer (2009) described, wherein the NRA is officially nonpartisan but in practice signals adherence to right-​wing conservative beliefs and values: “The NRA frames threats to gun rights and frontier masculinity as coming from liberal culture war forces, knowing this message resonates with hundreds of thousands, even millions of conservative white men who feel they are under attack by various liberal causes, primarily gun control” (16). Having a Black program host and featuring the occasional guest of color superficially allows the organization to appear more diverse and “claim the mantle of racial inclusiveness” (Lowndes 2017, 7) without altering the fundamentally white power structure on which it rests.

Temporality Timing is a central factor in any information environment. The lineup of featured media content usually changes each weekday, but not on weekends. This schedule sends a mixed message that highlights the hybridity of the NRA:  a news outlet is expected to have frequent content turnover seven days a week, while a business or nonprofit may operate only Monday through Friday. The NRA has created its own set of practices to combine these two genres. The usual schedule has been disrupted on some occasions. At times these related directly to the core mission of the NRA, for example, following the Las Vegas shooting on October 1, 2017. The shooting took place on a Sunday evening. Normally, based on the established pattern, the minimum Monday lineup would have included featured video segments from the Friday edition of the daily news and talk shows, such as Cam & Co. and Stinchfield, as well as a selection of articles from America’s 1st Freedom and the ILA news section. Instead, the only new item was an ILA piece with a rather poorly timed title, “NRA, Others Urge Supreme Court to Review ‘Assault Weapon,’ Magazine Ban,” (“Will SCOTUS Hear Md Challenge?,” NRA-​ILA, September 29, 2017). As it was dated September 29, it seems likely that it was scheduled in advance to post automatically on that date. No new content then appeared until the following Friday, October 6, when the leadership issued a joint statement and began making the rounds of the external shows highlighted in Table 5.2 (“NRA’s Wayne LaPierre and Chris Cox Issue Joint Statement,” NRA.org, October 7, 2017). Other mass shootings did not lead to such dramatic changes in the programming schedule. When twenty-​six people were killed at a church in Sutherland

 



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Springs, Texas, on November 5 (Montgomery, Mele, and Fernandez 2017), headline postings continued normally. Following the Parkland shooting, text-​based news stories were suspended for the rest of the week, but the daily NRATV programs were featured as usual. Beginning the following week, the featured daily lineup included a link to the National School Shield Program, created by the NRA following the Sandy Hook Massacre in 2012 to encourage arming teachers and staff at schools nationwide. One other notable disruption to normal practices occurred during the observation period. Until that time, featured links only appeared once in the lineup. On September 26, however, a new video appeared via the Freedom’s Safest Place channel, which produces institutional advertisements for the NRA. Titled “We Stand” and narrated by NRA spokesman and “Veteran U.S. Navy SEAL Dom Raso,” the link appeared fourteen times in that day’s lineup, alternating with all of the other featured segments and stories (“We Stand,” Freedom’s Safest Place, Season 2, Episode 4). This heavy rotation continued for the rest of that week and then gradually dropped to the normal rate of once per day. However, it remained in the mix for several weeks, until November 9, after Veterans Day. As the title suggests, the video was a response to the national context. Two days prior, NFL football players across the country had knelt on the field during the national anthem, as part of an organized protest against police violence (Stapleton 2017). Condemnation of the players’ actions was not unique to the NRA, but the issue did tend to divide public opinion along racial and political lines (Casteel 2017). The discursive structures of NRA media thus evidence patterns that erase or censure people of color who are not willing to be constrained by conservative rules.

Thematic and Stylistic Dimensions On December 1, 2017, a California court acquitted an undocumented immigrant charged with the gun death of a young woman, Kate Steinle (Yan and Simon 2017). That was a Friday. On Monday, the show notes for that day’s Stinchfield read as follows: Grant Stinchfield condemns the outcome of the Kate Steinle trial, the liberal politicians who give more rights to illegal aliens than they do law-​abiding Americans, and says he will no longer rely on a government infected by the parasites of progressivism to keep him safe. He’s going to build his own wall of responsible personal protection. The outcome of the Kate Steinle trial is not just a miscarriage of justice. It’s an abortion of American morality. . . . The tyrants. The media.

 

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The liberal politicians are all the reasons why I will no longer rely on our government to keep me and my family safe. . . . No one should be forced to live in a state where illegal alien felons are better protected than American citizens. (Grant Stinchfield in “Justice Is Dying in America,” Stinchfield, December 4, 2017) This story encapsulates nearly all of the thematic and stylistic dimensions that characterize NRA identity politics: outrage on behalf of the community of “law-​ abiding Americans” who share a common morality; threats to the integrity and safety of everything those Americans hold dear; anti-​government self-​reliance as an expression of freedom; the distortion of what is right by a corrupt or weak political class; evil, dangerous, criminal foreigners and liberals; and the need for a tougher justice system. All were expressed using heightened language and, in the segment itself, with host Grant Stinchfield addressing his viewers directly. A few points are worth examining more closely. The justice system is conflated with “government” and its “failures,” suggesting its inability to protect the physical safety of citizens. A “wall of responsible personal protection,” taking personal action in self-​reliance, is offered as the appropriate response to this deficiency. And while he alludes to what is arguably the other most contentious issue in American public life (“not just a miscarriage of justice . . . an abortion of American morality”), nowhere did Stinchfield mention that the murder weapon was a gun. This section explores the dimensions that emerged from analysis of the discursive content of NRA media, arguing that Second Amendment discourse represents a particular subcategory of right-​wing populism to construct a distinctly American sociopolitical identity class. I offer a few specific examples, representative of the vastness of content reviewed during the observation period. Homogeneous community. As suggested by scholars of political communication, the NRA frequently uses collective language to create a sense of mutual belonging (Wodak 2015). Common phrases include references to “gun owners,” “law-​abiding citizens,” or more generally “Americans.” This population is described in one instance as “tired of hearing the same old anti-​Trump rhetoric” (“Laura Loomer: Fighting Back,” Bill Whittle’s Hot Mic, June 30, 2017) and in another as having “nothing to apologize for” (“America Has Nothing to Apologize For,” Cam & Co., July 5, 2017) as examples of the kinds of attitudes and grievances attributed to them. Threat modality and antagonists. Shared traditions and values are referenced throughout NRA media, often accompanied by vivid descriptions of the threats they face. Foremost is a reverence for the Constitution and the right to keep and bear arms inscribed in the Second Amendment. Stinchfield used the presumed community bonds to urge audience members to mobilize against the threat of an “energized” Left committed to enacting gun control:

 



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We must meet their passion with a greater force from a greater number. We can, I know we can, because we have. The time is now to stand tall, and let America’s anti-​gunners know if they come for us, our guns or any of our freedoms they will face the fury and might of our most powerful tool . . . the truth as spelled out in the Constitution. Our fighting words are written on those few pages, born from the wisdom and lessons of tyranny that our founding fathers faced. (“What Will 2018 Bring?,” Stinchfield, January 4, 2018) Note that Stinchfield is careful to use a loaded term like “weapon” only in relation to truth, shifting the terms of his threat into the rhetorical domain. Self-​reliance as  freedom. Sociologist George Lakoff (2006) addressed the deceptive simplicity of the term “freedom” and the different ways it is deployed across the political spectrum. In particular, he observed that conservative populism frames oppression as “the intrusion of liberal PC values on personal conservative freedoms” (135), framing liberty as freedom from impositions on one’s actual or aspirational lifestyle, as well as the freedom to engage in activities and behaviors in support of that lifestyle. Unsurprisingly, the ability to purchase, carry, and use guns of all kinds in as many ways as possible is seen as the most complete expression of freedom. Both of the previous passages associate liberal politicians with tyrants and tyranny and advocate for personal gun ownership as a way of reclaiming autonomy from government malice and incompetence. Political and cultural negative identities. Based on the media artifacts examined, the NRA considers its primary threats to come from three categories of people: the Left/​Democrats, the media, and gun control advocates. In many cases little to no distinction is made among these categories. Additional dangers include government, immigrants, criminals, and terrorism. At least one of these threats is addressed daily via the featured media. The language used to describe these categories is very similar, as it consistently references violence, anger, and hatred, all of which Melzer (2009) identifies as drivers of fear tactics used by the NRA. For example, after the congressional baseball shooting, Breitbart columnist A. W. R. Hawkins wrote in America’s 1st Freedom that “people on the left responded immediately by blaming the victim for a violent crime that was carried out by a deranged left-​wing zealot” (“How the Left Incites Violence, Then Spins It into Justification for More Gun Control,” America’s 1st Freedom, June 19, 2017). The media are also labeled as violent and deceitful, as part of an ongoing theme. While pervasive throughout the NRA featured media, the most prominent face of this anti-​media campaign is spokesperson Dana Loesch. Titles of some of her videos and interviews over the course of the observation period

 

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include “Media Malpractice” and “Media’s Hypocrisy Cannot Be Ignored.” In “The Violence of Lies,” Loesch states, “the left uses their media to assassinate real news. . . . The only way to save our country and our freedom from their lies is to fight the violence with the clenched fist of truth” (“The Violence of Lies,” Freedom’s Safest Place, Season 2, Episode 2). In another video, she held a cigarette lighter to a copy of the New York Times (“The Fire of Truth,” Freedom’s Safest Place, February 1, 2018). Not to be outdone, her colleague Grant Stinchfield took a sledgehammer to a computer displaying a series of images from mainstream news and popular media (“Our Greatest Weapon Is Truth,” February 12, 2018). In addition to shoring up sentiment against perceived antagonists and cementing positive social identity among members and sympathizers, these anti-​media spots also serve a publicity function. Once a provocative segment airs, the spokesperson will frequently appear on another NRA show to discuss the outraged reactions of liberals and news elites. For instance, soon after the “Our Greatest Weapon” spot first dropped, Stinchfield hosted commentator Dan Bongino on his show, and the two discussed reactions to the video. Stinchfield opened the segment by saying, “The fake news media has spent much of the last two years taking a machete to the First Amendment. They’ve abused it, they’ve spat on the sacrifices of so many brave men and women who have fought and died for that freedom.” When Bongino appeared via remote link, he laughed: “These liberal snowflakes, I can’t get over it. You know, I don’t think you guys get it: like, the whole purpose of the ad campaign was directed to get you to do exactly what you’re doing. And you imbeciles fell directly in the trap!” (“Dan Bongino:  Sledgehammer of Truth,” Stinchfield, February 13, 2018). The NRA channels do not have the reach and visibility of most of their mainstream counterparts. While they seek to embed themselves deeper into the network of conservative news sources, as we saw in the structural analysis, they are using content strategies to earn coverage by those they attack, in a subversion of the status quo power structure. Systemic, reactionary, and autocratic power and control. Power and control are themes deeply embedded in NRA discourse, but they vary in terms of their object (who or what needs to be controlled) and subject (who should be responsible for acting). The term “systemic power and control” refers here to the suggestion that domestic political and social power structures, such as those embedded in patriarchal and white supremacist systems, should be maintained. “Reactionary authoritarianism” is a populist mode that urges vigilance against government overreach and corrupt institutions, including mainstream media. Finally, “autocratic authoritarianism” calls for the intervention of military or law enforcement to address perceived societal ills.

 



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Threats are often elided when making a point about the need for control. For example, in one installment of the Commentators series, footage of unspecified street riots was voiced over by spokesman Dom Raso, who accused “government officials” of encouraging protest marches, “which they know for a fact have been turning into violence in our streets.” He continued: If you want to know what true oppression is, I suggest you open your eyes to the ideology that lurks around the globe that wants nothing more than for you to perish. Muslim-​majority countries where by law women cannot even go to school or drive. Where a woman can be killed if she is raped—​they call it an “honor killing.” Try marching with your hats over there. They’ll stone you to death for it. (“Organized Anarchy,” Commentators, Season 7, Episode 3, July 9, 2017) This segment highlights negative political identities (government, Muslims, feminists—​the “try marching with your hats” is a clear dig at the Women’s March where many women wore pink knitted caps) in support of both systemic and reactionary power and control. Women are reminded to appreciate the relative privilege they enjoy in the United States, which is depicted as under constant threat from Muslim Others. The only defense is a vigilant population willing to defend its freedoms and values, with arms. International coverage frequently focuses on the vulnerability of people in countries where gun ownership is restricted, both cementing a sense of national pride among American gun enthusiasts and reinforcing the equivalence between freedom and firearms. For example, an ILA article cited new reports of changing sentiments among United Kingdom residents “amidst a string of terrorist attacks and an increase in violent crimes perpetrated with guns and knives” (“UK: Growing Support for Arming More Police,” ILA, September 22, 2017). This piece also highlights the importance of armed law enforcement among the core NRA values. Tougher criminal justice and increased personal gun ownership are framed as paired solutions to violent crime. The NRA inhabits a space of tension between extreme individualism and self-​reliance and a reverence for more autocratic power and control through law enforcement and military. Fear appeals depict the danger as a growing emergency: a segment of Ginny Simone Reporting warned that “violent criminals in California are being released early from prison, only to head back to the streets to prey on more innocent victims,” since “liberal policies and soft-​on-​crime positions are making California a very dangerous place to live.” A prosecutor is quoted as saying that the situation “makes me want to own guns. . . . Gotta be able to protect yourself because the state is not going to do it” (“California’s Flash Justice,” Ginny Simone Reporting, October 25, 2017).

 

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Institutions are shown as so unreliable that even criminal justice workers themselves promote personal defense over civic process. The theme of safety and protection is central to the NRA’s reasoning. In a segment of Carry Guard Daily, a retired military officer succinctly expressed this fundamental belief in the necessity of firearms that unites the discursive community of the NRA and its audiences: “There’s predators, prey and protectors. We wanna be protectors, I am my family’s secret service” (“Ret. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman: We Wanna Be Protectors,” Carry Guard Daily, February 13, 2018). This segment was featured in the NRA front-​page headlines on February 14, the day of the Parkland shooting. Confrontational style and direct address. As noted previously, populism is used here to refer to a mode of articulating beliefs and identities, rather than as an ideological perspective unto itself (De Cleen et al. 2018). Several of the previous examples illustrate the heated rhetoric, dramatic visuals, violent themes, and mocking tone often used to delegitimize outgroup members. Most of the video segments are filmed in “talk radio” style, with a commentator addressing the camera directly, or with a guest. The studios are informal and the hosts dress casually, creating a comfortably intimate setting. First-​and second-​person address are common to enhance identification.

Second Amendment Discourse It is now possible to formulate a framework of Second Amendment discourse that also accounts for the previous discussion of the populist style of right-​wing discourse in tandem with the specific elements present in the NRA mediasphere. Table 5.2 summarizes the main discursive themes relevant to each dimension. The construction of a political identity and social movement centered around access to a particular manufactured good creates a hybridization of citizen and consumer. It ties the NRA and its audience members to the economic fortunes of firearm and ammunition manufacturers and distributors while simultaneously creating a political force against regulating those markets, in the name of constitutional rights. It is worth highlighting the nature of power dynamics within this framework. Distributed political power is situated in the community or group, a product of the social and historical ties that bind members together and their relative ability to act legally, politically, or economically against corrupt elites or outsiders. While those sources of power are also invoked in Second Amendment discourse, through appeals to a common social identity as gun owners and enthusiasts, the introduction of weaponry as a fundamental civic right diminishes the force of social and political power. The potential for deadly violence

 



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Table 5.2  Dimensions of Second Amendment Discourse Dimension

Description

Expressions in Second Amendment Discourse

Homogeneous community

Rhetorically encourages social identification with others who allegedly share similar values, traditions, and practices.

“Law-​abiding gun owners” are authentic Americans. There is limited acceptance of diversity, only with complete adherence to all other norms, values, and practices.

The integrity and continuity of the community is at risk.

The world is rife with threats to individual and collective safety; “true American” values and traditions are under attack. Specifically, the Second Amendment is under siege from various quarters. This narrative extends to the subject of “freedom” more broadly, with the right to bear arms seen as one core principle of this larger topic.

Threat modality

Outgroup antagonists are behind the threats to the community. Political

Antagonists have dishonestly seized power from the deserving people.

The main antagonists are the Left/​liberals/​Democrats, supporters of gun control, and the mainstream media (seen as largely overlapping groups). Overreaching and corrupt or incompetent government is another.

Cultural

Antagonists are perceived as inherently inferior.

Muslims, immigrants, and criminals also pose dangers.

Negative identities

(continued )

 

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Table 5.2 Continued Dimension

Description Systemic

Power and control

Expressions in Second Amendment Discourse Sociocultural structures need to be restored or maintained to conserve community values.

Patriarchy and white supremacy can be supported by using firearms as a proxy for diminishing social and political power among marginalized groups.

Reaction- The people must ary collectively mobilize to restore their threatened or eroded traditions.

The best guard against a tyrannical government is for citizens to remain armed at all times, elect officials who will defend their right to do so, and ignore the lies of mainstream media.

Autocratic Police or military force must be used to vanquish the antagonists.

“Law and order” solutions combined with individual gun ownership and skills are the best preventative measures and remedies for crime at any scale.

Confrontational Aggressive, dramatic language Ridicule and disgust are effecand mocking are used to delegiti- tive attack weapons and help style mize outgroup members. delineate social boundaries. Direct address

Visual and textual use of first-​ and second-​person address, eye contact, and other techniques to cultivate a sense of personal relationship.

The presenter is a peer, a fellow gun owner and enthusiast just like the viewer.

remains an unacknowledged undercurrent of all political and culture debates within this discursive frame. The rhetorical solution adopted within the NRA mediasphere is to flip the script and associate language of violence and anger exclusively with outgroups, in contrast to peaceful, law-​abiding gun owners.

Conclusion Today’s hybrid media environment is one in which “actors create, tap, or steer information flows in ways that suit their goals and in ways that modify, enable, or disable others’ agency, across and between a range of older and newer media

 



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settings” (Chadwick 2013, 4). As a result, mediated cultures can be shaped by powerful actors who do not belong to the traditional category of media producers. Increased mediatization has led to what Forchnter, Kryzanowski, and Wodak (2013) referred to as “ ‘media democracies’ in which media-​savvy performances seem to become more important than traditional politics” (205). Secondary and tertiary political actors can therefore serve to facilitate and normalize the adoption of increasingly extreme political perspectives (Wodak 2015). The NRA has taken full advantage of this hypermediacy in an effort to reach and mobilize constituents, and its considerable political, economic, and cultural influence make it an important subject of inquiry for any comprehensive examination of conservative media. Viewed in this light, it seems appropriate to characterize NRA media as playing a meaningful role in the political ecosystem, even while acknowledging that their audiences are likely not as large as those of more traditional mainstream outlets. Lowndes (2008) urged scholars to dedicate “close attention to the way that language reshapes political identities (and therefore interests)” to tease out nuances that might otherwise be overlooked, and to escape “the cramped notions of the possible” (10). If we accept Fairclough’s (2001) definition of genres as “diverse ways of . . . producing social life,” and discourses as “diverse representations of social life which are inherently positioned” (123), we can suggest that through its media channels, the NRA combines the trappings of news genres and right-​wing discourses with populist styles of expression to enact a Second Amendment–​centric mode of social, cultural, and political engagement. While the internalization of maximal Second Amendment values is not confined to NRA members or consumers of its media, it seems undeniable that the organization plays an important role in amplifying and reinforcing these identities across multiple audiences and into mainstream media. Patrick (2013) asserted that “to study NRA is to study many of the more dramatic elements of social action, including social cleavage, conflict, ideology, the growth of an apparently indomitable resistance over time and—​importantly—​ the social functions of mass media in modern society” (9). Today that statement appears even more true, as through hybridization, technology, and social upheaval, the NRA is the media. From its position within the right-​wing information landscape, it capitalizes on those social functions to promote its own form of identity politics.

References Associated Press. 2004. “NRA to Launch News Company.” Fox News, April 16. Accessed July 1, 2017. http://​www.foxnews.com/​story/​2004/​04/​16/​nra-​to-​launch-​news-​company.html.

 

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Baym, Geoffrey. 2005. “The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism.” Political Communication 22 (3): 259–​276. Casteel, Kathryn. 2017. “How Do Americans Feel About the NFL Protests? It Depends on How You Ask.” FiveThirtyEight, October 9.  https://​fivethirtyeight.com/​features/​how-​do-​ americans-​feel-​about-​the-​nfl-​protests-​it-​depends-​on-​how-​you-​ask/​. Chadwick, Andrew. 2013. The Hybrid Media System:  Politics and Power. New  York:  Oxford University Press. Chuck, Elizabeth, Alex Johnson, and Corky Siemaszko. 2018. “17 Killed in Mass Shooting at High School in Parkland, Florida.” NBC News, February 15. Accessed on April 1, 2018. https://​w ww.nbcnews.com/​news/​us-​news/​police-​respond-​shooting-​parkland-​f lorida-​ high-​school-​n848101. Collins, Laura J. 2014. “The Second Amendment as Demanding Subject: Figuring the Marginalized Subject in Demands for an Unbridled Second Amendment.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 17 (4): 737–​756. De Cleen, Benjamin. 2018. “The Conservative Political Logic:  A Discourse-​ Theoretical Perspective.” Journal of Political Ideologies 23 (1):  10–​ 29. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​ 13569317.2017.1397917. De Cleen, Benjamin, Jason Glynos, and Aurelien Mondon. 2018. “Critical Research on Populism:  Nine Rules of Engagement.” Organization. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​ 1350508418768053. Fairclough, Norman. 2001. “Critical Discourse Analysis as a Method in Social Scientific Research.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 121–​ 138. London: Sage Publications. Fairclough, Norman. 2013. Language and Power. New York: Routledge. Floyd, Nancy. 2008. She’s Got a Gun. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Forchtner, Bernhard, Michal Kryzanowski, and Ruth Wodak. 2013. “Mediatization, Right-​Wing Populism and Political Campaigning: The Case of the Austrian Freedom Party.” In Media Talk and Political Elections in Europe and America, edited by Mats Ekström and Andrew Tolson, 205–​228. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Harrison, Sarah, and Michael Bruter. 2011. Mapping Extreme Right Ideology:  An Empirical Geography of the European Extreme Right. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Hemmer, Nicole. 2016. Messengers of the Right:  Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hennessy-​Fiske, Molly. 2013. “NRA's Black Commentator Becomes Web Sensation.” Los Angeles Times, July 23. Accessed on March 10, 2018. http://​www.latimes.com/​nation/​la-​na-​black-​ guns-​nra-​20130723-​dto-​htmlstory.html. Lakoff, George. 2006. Whose Freedom? The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Lowndes, Joseph. 2008. From the New Deal to the New Right:  Race and the Southern Origin of Modern Conservatism. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Lowndes, Joseph. 2017. “Populism in the United States.” In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, 232–​246. London: Oxford University Press. Lunceford, Brett. 2015. “Armed Victims:  The Ego Function of Second Amendment Rhetoric.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 18 (2): 333–​345. Meléndez, Carlos, and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2017. “Political Identities: The Missing Link in the Study of Populism.” Party Politics. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​1354068817741287. Melzer, Scott. 2009. Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War. New York: New York University Press. Montgomery, David, Christopher Mele, and Manny Fernandez. 2017. “Gunman Killed at Least 26 in Attack on Rural Texas Church.” New York Times, November 5. Accessed on April 1, 2018. https://​www.nytimes.com/​2017/​11/​05/​us/​church-​shooting-​texas.html.

 



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Ostiguy, Pierre. 2017. “Populism:  A Socio-​Cultural Approach.” In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, 73–​97. London: Oxford University Press. Patrick, Brian Anse. 2013. The National Rifle Association and the Media: The Motivating Force of Negative Coverage. London: Arktos Media. Shear, Michael D., Adam Goldman, and Emily Cochrane. 2017. “Congressman Steve Scalise Gravely Wounded in Alexandria Baseball Field Ambush.” New York Times, June 14. Accessed on March 15, 2018. https://​www.nytimes.com/​2017/​06/​14/​us/​steve-​scalise-​congress-​ shot-​alexandria-​virginia.html. Stange, Mary Zeiss, and Carok K. Oyster. 2000. Gun Women:  Firearms and Feminism in Contemporary America. New York: New York University Press. Stapleton, Arnie. 2017. “More Than 200 NFL Players Sit or Kneel During National Anthem.” Chicago Tribune, September 24. http://​www.chicagotribune.com/​sports/​football/​ct-​nfl-​ national-​anthem-​kneeling-​20170924-​story.html. Wamsley, Laurel. 2017. “Coroner Releases Causes of Death for All 58 Victims of Las Vegas Shooting.” NPR, December 22. Accessed on March 25, 2018. h tt p s : / / ​ w w w. n p r.o r g / ​ s e c t i o n s / ​ t h e t w o - ​ w ay / ​ 2 0 1 7 / ​ 1 2 / ​ 2 2 / ​ 5 7 2 9 4 1 5 8 3 /​ coroner-​releases-​causes-​of-​death-​for-​all-​58-​victims-​of-​las-​vegas-​shooting. Winkler, Adam. 2011. Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Wodak, Ruth. 2015. The Politics of Fear: What Right-​Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer. 2009. “Critical Discourse Analysis: History, Agenda, Theory and Methodology.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 1–​33. London: Sage Publications. Yan, Holly, and Dan Simon. 2017. “Undocumented Immigrant Acquitted in Kate Steinle Death.” CNN, December 1.  https://​www.cnn.com/​2017/​11/​30/​us/​kate-​steinle-​murder-​trial-​ verdict/​index.html.

 

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Making Media Safe for Corporate Power Market Libertarian Discourse in the 1940s and Beyond Victor Pickard American radio today is the product of business! —​J. Harold Ryan, former president of the National Association of Broadcasters, speaking to a group of Kiwanians in 1946

Pro-​market discourses played a significant role in framing media policy debates in the 1940s. As a “corporate libertarian” ideological project crystallized during the immediate postwar years, news media (especially broadcasting) became defined primarily as a commodity, not a public service, and public interest regulations became increasingly de-​legitimized. In addition to various forms of red-​baiting that radically shifted regulatory paradigms, notions of “free radio” and other libertarian tropes transformed the discursive landscape from the New Deal’s social democratic orientation to one that was overtly hostile toward affirmative policy interventions. This chapter considers both the specific role that corporate propaganda played in shaping media policy in the 1940s and the broader ideological struggle that such propaganda reflected. Ideological battles in the 1940s helped define core ideas in US political discourse from “freedom” and the “First Amendment” to the role of commerce and consumption in everyday life. Ultimately, these principles and relationships were established in ways that benefited corporate power, leaving a lasting imprint on many of the United States’ core systems, especially its media system. This chapter aims to elucidate the central role that corporate libertarians played in producing the conditions that allowed the modern conservative movement to thrive. This structural analysis—​one that draws attention to various connections or resonances between corporate libertarians and conservative media activists—​ has been missing from most accounts of the ascendant right-​wing mediasphere. 106

 



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Histories of Conservative Media While there has been a great florescence of historical work on the rise of the Right, similar histories of right-​wing media activism have been scarce. Fortunately, this is beginning to change. Increasingly, histories of the conservative movement are addressing issues that connect with media histories. One growing area of historical research focuses on how pro-​corporate forces have cultivated grassroots support and consumer sensibilities to produce a kind of market populism. For example, Bethany Moreton (2010) offers an especially interesting case of how conservative movement organizers counterintuitively used free market fundamentalism to appeal to the anti-​monopolist populist tendencies in the Sunbelt. Kevin Kruse (2015) looks at how corporate forces marshalled religion, leading to a “Christian libertarianism” becoming a core feature of the rise of the modern conservative movement. Another fruitful area of scholarship addresses the “liberal media” motif that has been such a major plank of right-​wing populism (see Lane, DiMaggio, and Major, this volume). This trope was not in wide circulation prior to the 1960s and 1970s; in fact, in the preceding decades the prevailing view of the US media landscape typically assumed that the press was a conservative force led by the likes of William Hearst, Robert McCormick, and Frank Gannett who held great animus toward the Roosevelt administration and the New Deal (Pickard 2015). Greenberg (2008) and Major (2012) both date the emergence of conservative media criticism to the 1950s/​1960s. Likewise, Cimaglio (2016) has examined conservative media reform discourse in the 1970s. I, along with Bauer (2018), find earlier examples of this conservative line of argumentation in the 1930s/​ 1940s, though it was much less prominent within political discourse compared to later in the twentieth century. An exemplar of the burgeoning historical literature on conservative media is Hemmer’s Messengers of the Right (2016). The book provides an invaluable history of how conservatives constructed their own media message machinery, but it leaves several key aspects underdeveloped. A major strength of the book is that Hemmer remains so close to her sources, but this tact may have predisposed her analysis to uncritically accept conservative activists’ claims that they were aggrieved by an imagined liberal status quo. The generous treatment of this position overlooks how left-​wing activists were also systematically pushed out of the media landscape and the broader political discourse. In conjunction with the red-​baiting of all positions left of center and the purging of leftists from social movements and power centers within Washington, DC (Storrs 2015), a similar ideological realignment occurred in the nation’s media. Hemmer’s account fails to mention the significant purge of liberal broadcasters at the exact moment that her history of conservative ascendance begins. She also pays little attention to

 

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the failed media reform efforts, policy changes, and rapid commercialization of American broadcasting that enabled the first wave of conservative media activism. She thereby risks naturalizing the narrative of liberal consensus and conservative dissent. Bringing this broader ideological struggle into focus is important because it is precisely at this moment in the 1940s when conservatives were actively restructuring the American news media system to render it more hospitable to conservative views. This is a long history—​one that exceeds the breadth of this essay, and one that I address elsewhere in much greater depth (see especially Pickard 2015). However, the specific conservative media reform project itself, and how it was carried out to reshape media to advance conservative views and voices, deserves more attention. While histories of the “rise of the Right” have helped bring the underlying intellectual movement into focus (e.g., Phillips-​Fein 2009; MacLean 2017), few have examined the discourses that dealt specifically with the American media system. In particular, the policy battles of the 1940s have been understudied by historians of conservative media, a period that witnessed the rise of a corporate libertarian paradigm that remade the media landscape. This political project aimed at restructuring the US media system was both part of the modern conservative movement analyzed by historians like Hemmer and Phillips-​Fein and a distinct type of policy activism that established the media regulatory/​discursive terrain that allowed this movement to flourish. In other words, in dialectical fashion this intellectual project was both created by and helped create the modern conservative movement. Conservative movement activists did not always work hand in hand with corporate libertarians, but the latter helped build the stage upon which the former improvised. In the following, I  discuss some specific ways that the conservative movement benefitted from a corporate libertarian media system.

The Common Sense of Corporate Libertarianism Status quo power relationships tend to be naturalized through discourse, often rendered commonsensical and beyond contention. This is no less true for the policies that determine our media system’s basic structures. Historical analysis helps denaturalize what we often presume to be part of the normal state of affairs. However, critical analyses of the historical and ideological roots of American media policy have been relatively rare. Fortunately, more general accounts exist that provide some clues as to what was happening within the ideological and discursive spheres around media policy in the 1940s. For example, historians such as Elizabeth Fones-​Wolf (1995) and Stuart Ewen (1996) have carefully documented how the first half of the twentieth century witnessed an ideological

 



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struggle in the United States between corporate interests and various social movements, especially labor and consumer rights groups. Fones-​Wolf (1995) observes: “In its quest to win support, the business community reached into virtually every facet of American society . . . [to promote] a particular understanding of the economic system” (189). Corporate propaganda efforts (what might be called “PR” today) also were largely focused on defining what it means to be American in ways that aligned with business interests. This framing equated consumption with freedom and capitalism with democracy. It also treated criticism of these relationships and proposals for alternative models as inherently un-​American and subversive. These discursive strategies helped naturalize unregulated capitalism and de-​legitimate public interest concerns outside of “the market.” Over time, this shrunk the US political imaginary as to what was permissible—​or even possible—​in everyday social life. Similar efforts sought to shape the US media system’s fundamental structures as part of an ideological project that I refer to as “corporate libertarianism” (Pickard 2013, 2015). Asserting that government has little legitimacy intervening in media markets, corporate libertarianism attaches individual freedoms to corporate entities, often elevating their First Amendment rights over the collective rights of audiences, local communities, diverse publics, and society as a whole. Within this framework, press freedoms are understood as primarily protecting corporate media institutions. This ideological framework assumes that an unregulated market is the most efficient and, therefore, the most socially desirable means for allocating important resources. Such market fundamentalism combines the exaltation of absolute individual liberty with the de-​legitimation of much that is public good related. Resulting from a number of policy battles in the 1940s (Pickard 2015), this logic crystallized as a tacit agreement between the state, the public, and media institutions. This “postwar settlement” for US media was characterized by self-​ regulation, industry-​defined social responsibility, and a libertarian understanding of the First Amendment—​resulting in a commercial media system that lacks robust noncommercial media, is dominated by oligopolies, and is protected by relatively weak public interest standards. Of course, the notion that government is an unwanted interloper in media markets is, in reality, a libertarian fantasy: from spectrum management to copyright protections to the enforcement of ownership regulations, government is always involved. The real question is how the government should be involved. Over the past few decades, government typically has intervened to aid corporations’ interests, not the public interest. How this arrangement and related assumptions became commonsensical in the 1940s is the subject of my earlier book (2015), so I only briefly touch on some of the basic communication strategies in the next section.

 

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Examples of 1940s Corporate Propaganda Led by the likes of the chamber of commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the National Association of Broadcasters, corporate propaganda efforts in the 1940s sought to undercut a social democratic challenge to media corporations’ and advertisers’ dominance over the US media system, especially broadcasting.1 This social democratic challenge was given force by labor, consumer, and civil rights groups at the grassroots level and by progressive policymakers within President Roosevelt’s New Deal project at the government level (Fones-​Wolf 2006). Their policy vision generally assumed that media was primarily a public service that was vitally important for democracy and could not be entirely supported by the market. Advertising would have to be contained and the entire media system would require some de-​commercialization. To contest this media reform movement, especially as it manifested at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), commercial broadcasters needed to launch a counternarrative. With anti-​communism as a backdrop, their strategic communications often took on the discursive shape of red-​ baiting. In general, they sought to de-​legitimize any government intervention that did not advance industry objectives. This strategy had the effect of casting any regulation not in line with profit seeking as inherently socialistic and suspect. In postwar media policy debates, broadcasters’ strategic communications amplified three general attack lines. First, they argued that public interest regulations were an attempt to censor free speech, and thus an infringement of broadcasters’ First Amendment rights. A second standard line of attack was that reforming commercial broadcasting was unnecessary because people were generally happy with their programming and the market simply provided audiences with what they wanted. A third and final argument rested on the assumption that public interest regulations reflected a creeping socialism, and therefore was anti-​ business and deeply un-​American. By assuming that radio had been developed purely by market forces, they argued that any deviation from the “free market”—​ a mischaracterization, because it overlooked the fact that their monopoly rights to the broadcast spectrum were antithetical to free market relationships—​was a betrayal of radio’s first principles. These polemics were meant to head off structural interventions that aimed to rein in commercial excesses or de-​privatize a portion of the radio spectrum for public use. Ultimately, they aimed to ensure

  This section draws from Pickard (2013, 2015).

1

 



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little legitimacy for government involvement in media markets outside of assisting commercial broadcasters’ profit-​maximizing operations. Invoking the narrative that radio was purely the product of unregulated commerce, the National Association of Broadcasters’ (NAB) president informed a group of Kiwanians that radio should be treated as a commodity because “it is just as much the kind of product as the vacuum cleaner, the washing machine, the automobile and the airplane.” Pegging 1935 as the time when “radio and its advertisers really began to get together and progress began,” he asserted, “Many a station operator who might have had a personal preference for poetry and the opera learned some sound lessons in selling and merchandising under tutelage of America’s good, hard-​headed businessmen, and it was the best thing that could have happened to him” (quoted in Wecter 1946, 6, 36). The most common trope in broadcasters’ propaganda was that of “Free Radio.” In addition to appearing in Broadcasting magazine, variations of this theme, often embracing the language of the First Amendment, appeared in postwar editorials and books. For example, the NAB issued a thick book titled Broadcasting and the Bill of Rights based on statements made during another set of congressional hearings, particularly anti-​regulation arguments proposed by NAB president Justin Miller (NAB 1947). The Republican presidential candidate Governor Thomas Dewey demonstrated its centrality in conservative ideology by declaring in 1944: “I believe that the FCC should have no right of censorship, that it should not control the content of radio programs. It should stay in the field of regulating technical facilities. And when the FCC starts to control program content, free radio goes out the window” (quoted in Wecter 1946, 5). Similarly, NBC president Niles Trammell’s congressional testimony was published as a pamphlet titled “Radio Must Remain Free,” in which he urged the senators in attendance to give radio a “new freedom from fear, the fear of the blight of government control” (Trammell 1943, 6). According to this perspective, an overbearing government posed the gravest threat to radio’s democratic potential. Other examples of these strategic communications emphasized how commercial broadcasting was a champion of the public interest. One manual published by the NAB explained in great detail: “In the broadest sense, the practice of public relations is ‘management in the public interest’ ” (NAB 1945, 5). Featuring photographs from radio stations around the country, the manual made declarations such as “A broadcaster is a guardian of the public trust” (83), “A broadcaster is part of the commercial life of his community” (95), and “A broadcaster knows that there is public interest in the progress of this great vehicle of free speech” (115). Recurring themes in the “pictorial story” were a record

 

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of public service, fine programming, and community involvement. An implicit narrative throughout the book portrayed commercial broadcasting as uniquely wholesome and integral to American daily life. Newspaper publishers, particularly those eager to acquire radio stations, also played a key role in elevating the libertarian “Free Radio” motif. The Chicago Tribune publisher Colonel McCormick—​who endeavored to acquire many radio stations—​argued that the FCC’s regulatory power to review license renewals should be discontinued so that “wave lengths will become property and be protected in the courts like any other property” (Wecter 1946). The “Free Radio” frame was also prominent in editorials published in Hearst-​owned newspapers, exemplified by a piece titled “The American Radio Must Be Free,” which asserted that the US Constitution “should be amended to give the American radio the same recognition it gives the American press, and to assure it the same FREEDOM” (Boston Daily Record 1946). Similarly, NAB president Justin Miller called for a “program of militant resistance to further encroachments of Government  . . .  upon radio’s freedom” (Broadcasting 1947). According to an FCC release, Miller “branded talk about ‘the people owning the air’ as a ‘lot of hooey and nonsense’ ” (Federal Communications Commission 1946). Trying to naturalize commercial control of the government airwaves was the primary objective—​and outcome—​of this political discourse. More than just opportunistic sloganeering, equating an unregulated commercial media system with the notion of freedom reflected a broader set of political and discursive maneuvers. For broadcasters to frame their arguments in terms of “Free Radio” afforded them a considerable advantage in policy debates. Although the notion of freedom is inherently unstable and contestable, staking out “freedom” is the ultimate prize in rhetorical warfare. Anything running counter to freedom in American political discourse is a priori alien, cast outside the bounds of acceptable practice. The continual clashes between corporate libertarian and social democratic positions throughout the 1940s suggests that the struggle centered on the role of the state as much as media. It also suggests that the contest far exceeded control of radio or media in general, but was in fact a struggle for political economic power (Pickard 2013, 2015). Corporations were essentially able to rewrite the social contract that defined the parameters of their power within democratic society. However, despite this triumph of a corporate libertarian paradigm, debates continued over commercial media’s normative role. One of the most contentious policy debates in the 1940s centered on what eventually became the fairness doctrine (Pickard 2018).

 



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The Rise and Fall of the Fairness Doctrine The fairness doctrine is a revealing case study of how a corporate agenda helped craft US media policy.2 Although the fairness norm stems from a liberal “marketplace of ideas” notion, a more libertarian ethos governed radio speech during commercial radio’s earliest years. Yet, legislative doctrine contained a concept of fairness at least since the 1927 Federal Radio Commission’s public interest clause. Laissez-​faire approaches to broadcast policy were also challenged as fascism ascended during the 1930s, with nativist and homegrown reactionaries such as Father Coughlin using the airwaves to galvanize frighteningly large followings. Strong political positions were also potentially bad for business if they scared off advertisers, and the 1939 NAB code encouraged broadcasters to adopt a no-​editorializing policy. The code even foreshadowed the fairness doctrine by stating that broadcasters had an obligation to “provide time for the presentation of public questions, including those of a controversial nature” (NAB 1939, 3). Debates around such interventions evidenced ongoing tensions between positive (freedom for) and negative (freedom from) liberties (Berlin, 1969). Policies that protected positive freedoms such as listeners’ rights ran up against commercial broadcasters’ business prerogatives and profit imperatives. This tension was central to the fairness doctrine’s precursor, the “Mayflower doctrine.” The original Mayflower decision emerged during the renewal process of the station Yankee Network Inc. (WAAB), whose record indicated that in 1937 and 1938 it had broadcasted the station owners’ editorial views. In response, the FCC made clear its stance against editorializing: “Under the American system of broadcasting . . . [given] the limitations in frequencies inherent in the nature of radio, the public interest can never be served by a dedication of any broadcast facility to the support of his own partisan ends” (FCC 1941). The FCC was especially concerned that broadcasters could attack anyone or any idea at will, and the abused would be unable to reply. Arguing that democratic radio depended on “fairly and objectively presented” ideas, the commission asserted:  “A truly free radio cannot be used to advocate the causes of the licensees. It cannot be used to support the candidates of his friends. It cannot be devoted to the support of principles he happens to regard most favorably.” It concluded, “In brief, the broadcaster cannot be advocate” (FCC 1941). The FCC’s Mayflower decision

  I describe the debates in this section in more detail in Pickard (2015). I also discuss the longer history of the fairness doctrine in Pickard (2018), from which parts of this section are drawn. 2

 

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put the entire commercial broadcast industry on notice that one-​sided editorializing would not be permitted. Even more important, an emboldened and increasingly progressive FCC—​arguably the last federal bastion of New Deal strength in the mid-​1940s—​was warning broadcasters that they were under close regulatory scrutiny. Despite this shot across the bow, the mid-​to late 1940s witnessed a gradual regulatory retreat at the FCC. The fairness doctrine would come to replace the more aggressive media regulations on broadcasters’ political editorializing guaranteed under the Mayflower doctrine. What would only later become known as the fairness doctrine represented a concession to widely held concerns that giving commercial broadcasters so much political power would lead to unchecked partisanship, one-​sided arguments, and various commercial excesses. This doctrine drew from the FCC’s original Mayflower decision, which included a consideration of fairness in its call for broadcasters to “provide full and equal opportunity for the presentation to the public of all sides of public issues” because “the licensee has assumed the obligation of presenting all sides of important public questions, fairly, objectively and without bias” (FCC 1941). This wording shows that the emphasis was not as much on the negative, individual freedoms of the speaker/​broadcaster as on the listeners’ positive rights for being able to hear a broad spectrum of debate. Nonetheless, after commercial broadcasters defeated the Blue Book (the FCC’s first real attempt to define broadcasters’ public service responsibilities) with a successful red-​baiting campaign (Pickard 2015), they felt emboldened to go after the no-​editorializing rule. Though this rule had been unassailable earlier in the decade, broadcasters framed the Mayflower doctrine as an infringement on their First Amendment rights by espousing a negative-​liberties rationale that such regulation amounted to an unjustified government intrusion. In contrast, many progressives sought to preserve the rule based on a structural analysis of media power and a positive interpretation of the First Amendment that upheld a collective freedom, one that guaranteed access to a diverse media system. As early as mid-​1946, rumors began circulating that the rule was being re-​ evaluated. Broadcasters’ main argument was that self-​ regulation would suffice. Progressive commissioners were clear in their understanding that “ ‘self-​ regulation’ inevitably ends up with regulation in the interests of the industry rather than the public” (Durr 1948). And the great majority of the letters to the FCC in the late 1940s were decidedly in favor of sustaining the Mayflower doctrine (Brinson 2004, 130). A  typical letter from a listener urged that “the Mayflower Decision be upheld. We cannot allow the air to be controlled by big business” (Baskin 1948). A letter to the FCC from a civil rights group echoed similar concerns regarding threats to the rights of “labor organizations, the Negro people, religious bodies and other minorities.” They argued that commercial

 



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broadcasters too often yielded to “pressure of Chambers of Commerce, the American Legion and such [conservative] forces” (Salkind 1948). During the FCC hearings of 1948, witnesses repeatedly expressed concerns about pro-​corporate voices overwhelming the airwaves. Many progressive groups, including the American Jewish Committee, the Lawyers Guild, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the United Automobile Workers (UAW), testified in support of the Mayflower doctrine. Given the recent purges of liberal radio commentators when dozens of popular left-​of-​ center personalities were removed from the air, many feared the wrath of uncontested right-​wing radio if the rule were discontinued. Indeed, progressives had good reason to assume that these newly granted rights would shirk impartiality and skew conservative. By allowing the market to dictate who gets heard—​ effectively censoring some voices from the public discourse—​many activist groups feared what would happen if commercial broadcasters were given free rein without public interest restraints that protected positive freedoms. Strong public support for maintaining the ban notwithstanding, the FCC ultimately voted in favor of repeal. The lone dissent came from Frieda Hennock, the first female commissioner, who felt that removing the editorializing ban was an open invitation for abuse (Brinson 2002, 146–​147). Commissioner Hennock noted that without a means of “policing and enforcing the requirement that the public trust granted a license be exercised in an impartial manner, it seems foolhardy to permit editorialization by licensees themselves.” She concluded that “prohibiting [such editorializing] is our only instrument for insuring the proper use of radio in the public interest” (FCC 1949). Her concern, shared by many contemporary reformers, was that stripped of such a protection, broadcasters’ commercial (and typically right-​wing views) could drown out other perspectives within public discourse. When the rule was revoked, the FCC nodded to these concerns by putting in its place a commitment to fairness: although stations could choose their own programming, they must “devote a reasonable percentage of their broadcasting time to the discussion of public issues of interest in the community served by their stations,” and “these programs [must] be designed so that the public has a reasonable opportunity to hear different opposing positions on the public issues of interest and importance in the community.” Although there was a general assumption borne out by public hearings that “licensees have an affirmative obligation to insure fair presentation of all sides of any controversial issue,” the FCC would try to strike a middle path by allowing for flexibility in broadcasters’ selections, but still expecting overall balance and fairness (FCC 1949). Despite such concessions, broadcasters felt they had decidedly won this battle. NAB president Justin Miller hailed it as “the greatest single victory in behalf of freedom of expression in this nation since the Zenger case confirming the

 

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editorial freedom of newspapers over a century ago” (quoted in the Yale Law Journal Company 1950, 760). He announced in front of the entire NAB convention that the FCC’s abandonment of its Mayflower doctrine “has resulted in widespread development of news, commentary, and editorial analysis in hundreds of broadcasting stations throughout the country” (quoted in the Yale Law Journal Company 1950, 760). Meanwhile, the trajectory of commercial broadcasters accruing more political economic power and facing less regulatory oversight was increasingly clear. Although it would become a valuable tool for progressives to fight prejudicial broadcasts, the fairness doctrine remained consistent with a libertarian self-​regulatory approach that privileged content over broader structural concerns. All would be handled within the framework of a self-​regulated, nominally socially responsible, commercial media system. Miller and the broadcast industry had good reason to feel victorious, but even the fairness doctrine was too regulatory for them, and broadcasters would continue to fight against it over the ensuing decades until it was ultimately repealed in 1987 (Pickard 2018). Yet here might be an example of where corporate libertarians and conservative media activists’ agendas somewhat diverged, for there is also a long history of the conservative movement actually supporting the fairness doctrine and leveraging it to its own advantage (Pickard 2018). Indeed, the conservative movement was somewhat split over this position. Right-​wing religious broadcasters Billy James Hargis and Carl McIntire were both targeted by fairness doctrine complaints, which provoked considerable conservative agitation against the doctrine in the 1960s. At the same time, however, conservative groups like Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media deployed the fairness doctrine to combat what they perceived as excesses of the “liberal media.” These groups often filed fairness doctrine complaints against NBC, ABC, and CBS, which helped get their views on the air (Hendershot 2011; Bauer 2017; Pickard 2018). Therefore, the Reagan-​era FCC’s decision to get rid of the doctrine in the 1980s caused much pushback and consternation from conservative media activists who relied on the policy (Clogston 2016). Right-​wing champions such as Newt Gingrich even tried to sanctify the doctrine by codifying it in legislation, but in attempting to pass a congressional bill they were opposed first by President Reagan and then by President Bush. In the ensuing years, after it became clear that repealing the doctrine helped create the necessary structural conditions for a massive right-​wing talk radio apparatus to emerge, conservatives became nearly uniform in their opposition (Pickard 2018). The rise and fall of the fairness doctrine lends insight into the complicated politics of conservative media policy reform. Some of these historical contradictions are discernible as far back as the 1940s during the shift of structural media criticism from left to right around the Mayflower doctrine (Bauer 2017). These

 



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tensions between different segments of the conservative movement continue to create vulnerabilities within the broader corporate libertarian project.

Contradictions of Corporate Libertarianism This history of right-​wing media policy activism brings into focus how libertarian policy discourses long sought to discredit government intervention in media systems. When wedded with corporate power, this discursive strategy undergirds the ideological project of corporate libertarianism by elevating a negative liberty (“freedom from” government intervention) over a positive one (“freedom to” a diverse media system). This arrangement enshrines a freedom of the press that privileges media producers’ and owners’ individual rights over the collective rights of listeners, readers, and the broader public to practice a mostly industry-​defined version of social responsibility. Within this framework, press freedoms are understood as primarily protecting corporate media institutions. This ideological framework attaches individual freedoms to corporate entities and assumes that an unregulated market is the most efficient and, therefore, the most socially desirable means for allocating important resources. An apotheosis of market fundamentalism, this paradigm combines the exaltation of absolute individual liberty with the de-​legitimation of much that is public good related. Thus, a corporate libertarian logic encourages media self-​regulation and leads to weak public interest standards. This media policy paradigm’s further ascendance in the 1980s was perhaps best articulated by Fowler and Brenner (1981), who called for a “marketplace approach” to media regulation. Serving as the FCC chair during the deregulatory era of the Reagan administration, Fowler would gain notoriety for his statement that television was nothing more than “a toaster with pictures.” His treatment of media as primarily products that were defined by vulgar “supply and demand” economics led to the FCC casting away many public interest protections that were perceived as impediments to an unfettered free market. This approach fails to acknowledge structural limitations and biases in a commercial media system, enabling a “market censorship” that systematically constrains the range of voices and views that are represented (Baker 2002). This laissez-​faire orientation in US media policy continues to impoverish discourses around positive speech rights and press freedoms. And it continues to benefit right-​wing voices and views within the US media system. A renewed focus on corporate propaganda, particularly its historical context, is timely for a number of reasons. In addition to the rise of fake news, our current political moment is witnessing an increased articulation toward a corporate libertarian regime. From “deregulating” media policy to the dismantling of public

 

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education, this logic is ascendant. To reverse the “common sense” of such logic (Gramsci 1971), we will have to understand the elite consensus—​and the attendant propaganda mechanisms—​that helped normalize its assumptions.

Uncovering the Propaganda of Corporate Libertarianism As discussed earlier, the growing interest in the history and contemporary role of conservative media opens up one potentially fruitful area of inquiry (Hemmer 2016). Another possible thread is to examine how corporate libertarianism creates a media system that is rendered structurally vulnerable to various forms of propaganda. In particular, anti-​democratic forces can easily exploit commercial logics to circulate media content that is both profitable and persuasive (Pickard 2017a). This formula has led to the rise of right-​wing echo chambers as well as the much-​denounced “fake news” and other forms of misinformation that is proliferating within social media today. But much of this criticism lacks historical and structural explanations for how we ended up with a media system designed to amplify these voices and views. Such an analysis must foreground market fundamentalism as a crucial component of the modern conservative movement. Indeed, corporate libertarian discourses are still very much alive today. And while the term “propaganda” is often most associated with stealth government communications, corporate propaganda generally has not received the same level of scholarly attention. As a general concept, “propaganda” smacks of bygone eras and has largely fallen out of favor as a subject worthy of study. This is probably due in part to its definitional imprecision, but there is also an implicit assumption that the term no longer adequately describes contemporary relationships regarding power and information. However, recent concerns about various forms of misinformation and disinformation have brought propaganda-​related discussions back into the popular vernacular. Nonetheless, confusion and a lack of consensus regarding propaganda’s definition continues to impede productive discussions about what needs to happen to stop the scourge of misinformation in our news and information systems. While addressing such quandaries about how we understand propaganda goes beyond the scope of this chapter, the term still holds contemporary relevance. Understanding its usage in historical context can help set the stage for challenging it. In particular, looking at media policy debates in the 1940s, I argue, can help shed light on specific aspects of corporate propaganda. As practiced in the 1940s, there are two overlapping components to this ideological process. The first one was to frame media and communication as a commodity that should be left entirely to the market. The second step was to

 



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reconstruct media policy based on this understanding that the unregulated market should always be the final arbiter of media content. This policy approach, in turn, further commodified media, making it more hospitable to corporate power and generally right-​wing views, and less hospitable to informative content that aimed for diverse views and voices. While there is renewed interest in conservative media history, too little of this timely research focuses on the structural roots—​specifically the discursive and policy origins—​of the conservative media movement. This chapter makes a modest attempt to draw attention to such gaps in the research. In doing so, it aims to underscore the ideological work that is required to confront what I refer to as the “misinformation society” (Pickard 2017b). However, much more work is needed, both in scholarship and in political organizing.

What Is to Be Done? Ultimately, whether examining health care policy, global warming, or the future of education, today’s corporate strategic communications often obscure the policy roots of social problems, mask market failures in providing for society’s essential needs, and narrow the possibilities for alternative models. To contest this “discursive capture,” we need to displace the corporate libertarian paradigm and reframe our understandings about the nature of news and information in democratic society. A “social democratic” vision of media would recognize the market’s limitations to adequately support society’s communication needs. Part of this program should include building a more robust program for the government provision of public service journalism. Reforms geared toward expanding public service journalism might involve subsidies for an expanded public media system, tax incentives for struggling media institutions to transition into low-​ and nonprofit status, and government-​sponsored research and development efforts for new digital models that may include public/​private hybrids. Together, these initiatives would remove or reduce market pressures and help restore journalism’s public service mission. First and foremost, non-​market-​based forms of support are required for journalism’s survival, especially since the market increasingly fails to support even minimal levels of news coverage for vast regions and crucial policy issues (Pickard 2019). Most ideal would be a large journalism trust that is self-​ sustaining and shielded from powerful interests. This public media trust would be publicly operated, remain autonomous from government, and be able to receive charitable contributions from other entities such as foundations. However, all donations must be severed of any attachments to ensure independence from any single funder or government entity. A  well-​funded national—​and ultimately,

 

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international—​journalism service could help ensure that everyone has access to quality news. But these reforms cannot happen without reframing discourse around news media based on new normative foundations such as positive freedoms that emphasize media’s public service mission (Pickard 2016). Such a social democratic approach treats journalism as a vital infrastructure, not merely a business commodity. Instead of being used as a shield against structural reforms, the US First Amendment should help encourage actual opportunities for speech and press freedoms. While a healthy democracy requires both negative and positive rights, freedom of speech cannot be assumed simply by the absence of state interference (Kenyon 2014). Freedom of speech requires a proactive state to help create the necessary conditions, especially within media systems governed by a commercial logic (Pickard 2013). This calls for a social democratic orientation that assesses a media system’s value by how it benefits all of society rather than how it serves individual freedoms, private property rights, and profits for a relative few. How do we define this project? Such an approach privileges the ideal of having diverse voices and viewpoints in the media system. It is as skeptical of private concentrated media power among corporate actors as it is of governments. Applicable to digital and global contexts, it must protect the collective rights held by publics, audiences, and communities over the individual rights of corporations. And it must elevate positive liberties in which universal rights of access are at least as important as the individual freedoms most cherished within libertarianism and classical liberalism. In today’s highly inegalitarian world with media power concentrated among a handful of corporate actors (Freedman 2014), this project legitimates an activist state that redistributes communication resources. It values a mixed media system with structural alternatives to commercial models. But we cannot advance this project without first countering corporate libertarianism. This will require intellectual work—​work that scholars and public intellectuals are well positioned to spearhead (Pickard 2016). In particular, scholars of conservative media history have a special role to play in the study of right-​wing news and commentary. Their work is essential in any broader project of rolling back the corporate libertarian model. For example, in looking at media regulation and activism in the 1940s, the relative absence of modes of redress created by the corporate libertarian model of media regulation created space for conservative media critique to grow. Understanding the media reform movement of the 1940s is vital to understanding the emergence of the conservative movement in the subsequent decades (e.g., Bauer 2017). Scholars of media history are well positioned to advance this project, for it is through history that we can expand our political imaginary and intervene in policy discourse by creating counternarratives and denaturalizing dangerous

 



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ideologies such as corporate libertarianism. Given the proper intellectual tools, we can dare to imagine a media system where it is not rational to amplify misinformation at the expense of democratic concerns. We can envision a system that encourages diverse discourses not dictated by market imperatives. Understanding the history of corporate libertarian propaganda is the first step toward stopping it.

References Baker, C. Edwin. 2002. Media, Markets and Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Baskin, Mildred. 1948. Correspondence from Mildred Baskin to the FCC, March 29. Docket #8516, Box 3381, Folder “Letters of Endorsement or Protest.” National Archives at College Park, MD. Bauer, A. J. 2017. “Before ‘Fair and Balanced’: Conservative Media Activism and the Rise of the New Right.” PhD dissertation, New York University. Bauer, A. J. 2018. “Journalism History and Conservative Erasure.” American Journalism 35 (1): 2–​26. Berlin, Isaiah. 1969. “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In Four Essays on Liberty, 118–​172. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boston Daily Record. 1946. “The American Radio Must Be Free.” May 24. Brinson, Susan. 2002. Personal and Public Interests:  Frieda Hennock and the FCC. Westport, CT: Praeger. Brinson, Susan. 2004. The Red Scare, Politics, and the FCC, 1941–​1960. WestPort, CT: Praeger. Broadcasting. 1947. September 22, 14. Cimaglio, Chris. 2016. “‘A Tiny and Closed Fraternity of Privileged Men’:  The Nixon–​Agnew Antimedia Campaign and the Liberal Roots of the U.S. Conservative ‘Liberal Media’ Critique.” International Journal of Communication 10: 1–​19. Clogston, Frankie. 2016. “The Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and the Irony of Talk Radio: A Story of Political Entrepreneurship, Risk, and Cover.” Journal of Policy History 28 (2): 375–​396. Durr, Clifford. 1948. Correspondence from Clifford Durr to Edward J. Heffron. Box 31, File 7. Clifford J.  Durr Papers. Alabama Department of Archives and History. Montgomery, Alabama. Ewen, Stuart. 1996. PR! A Social History of Spin. New York: Basic Books. Federal Communications Commission. 1941. “Mayflower Broadcasting Corporation and the Yankee Network, Inc. (WAAB).” FCC Reports 8: 339–​341. Federal Communications Commission. 1946. May 3, Release 92873. Federal Communications Commission. 1949. Editorializing by Broadcast Licensees, 13 FCC 1246. Fones-​Wolf, Elizabeth. 1995. Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–​1960. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Fones-​Wolf, Elizabeth. 2006. Waves of Opposition: Labor, Business, and the Struggle for Democratic Radio. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Fowler, Mark, and Daniel Brenner. 1981. “Marketplace Approach to Broadcast Regulation.” Texas Law Review 60: 207–​257. Freedman, Des. 2014. The Contradictions of Media Power. London: Bloomsbury. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International. Greenberg, David. 2008. “The Idea of ‘the Liberal Media’ and Its Roots in the Civil Rights Movement.” The Sixties 1 (2): 167–​186. Hemmer, Nicole. 2016. Messengers of the Right. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

 

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Hendershot, Heather. 2011. What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-​Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kenyon, Andrew. 2014. “Assuming Free Speech.” Modern Law Review 77 (3): 379–​408. Kruse, Kevin. 2015. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. New York: Basic Books. MacLean, Nancy. 2017. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. New York: Viking. Major, Mark. 2012. “Objective but Not Impartial:  Human Events, Barry Goldwater, and the Development of the ‘Liberal Media’ in the Conservative Counter-​Sphere.” New Political Science 34 (4): 455–​468. Moreton, Bethany. 2010. To Serve God and Wal-​Mart:  The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. National Association of Broadcasters. 1939. The Code of the National Association of Broadcasters, Adopted by the 17th Annual Convention of the NAB, July 11. National Association of Broadcasters. 1945. Management in the Public Interest. Washington, DC. National Association of Broadcasters. 1947. Broadcasting and the Bill of Rights, Statements Presented by Representatives of the Broadcasting Industry During Hearings in the White Bill (s. 1333) to Amend the Communications Act of 1934, Before a Sub-​committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, June 17–​27. Washington, DC. Phillips-​Fein, Kim. 2009. Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. New York: W. W. Norton. Pickard, Victor. 2013. “Social Democracy or Corporate Libertarianism? Conflicting Media Policy Narratives in the Wake of Market Failure.” Communication Theory 23 (4): 336–​355. Pickard, Victor. 2015. America’s Battle for Media Democracy:  The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pickard, Victor. 2016. “Toward a People’s Internet: The Fight for Positive Freedoms in an Age of Corporate Libertarianism.” NORDICOM: 61–​68. Pickard, Victor. 2017a. “Media Failures in the Age of Trump.” Political Economy of Communication 4 (2): 118–​122. Pickard, Victor. 2017b. “The Misinformation Society.” Public Books. https://​www.publicbooks. org/​the-​big-​picture-​misinformation-​society/​ Pickard, Victor. 2018. “The Strange Life and Death of the Fairness Doctrine: Tracing the Decline of Positive Freedoms in American Policy Discourse.” International Journal of Communication 12: 3434–​3453. Pickard, Victor. 2019. “The Violence of the Market.” Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 20 (1): 154–​158. Salkind, Eleanor. 1948. Correspondence from Eleanor F.  Salkind to the FCC, April 6.  Box 31, Folder 8. Clifford J. Durr Papers. Storrs, Landon. 2015. The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Trammell, Niles. 1943. “Radio Must Remain Free.” Statement given before the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, December 7–​8. Wecter, D. 1946. “The Public Domain of the Air.” The Saturday Review of Literature IXIX (20), May 18: 5–​6,  36–​38. The Yale Law Journal Company. 1950. “The Mayflower Doctrine Scuttled.” Yale Law Journal 59 (4): 759–​770.

 

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Conservative News and Movement Infrastructure Alex DiBranco

The significance of media leadership in the conservative movement during the 1950s and 1960s has been convincingly established by historian Nicole Hemmer. In Messengers of the Right (2016), she portrays the magazines Human Events and National Review, along with the radio show Manion Forum and Regnery Publishing, as first-​generation leaders of a growing conservative consciousness in the United States. These outlets successfully promoted the frame of “liberal media bias” as one rationale for their existence, decrying the establishment line on anti-​communism, racial segregation, and support for the Vietnam War. Media leaders of that era, who perceived a similar liberal threat on college campuses, likewise supported conservative youth/​student organizing with the founding of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF)—​influencing and educating future leaders of the conservative movement. In the decades that followed, ambitious conservatives interested in bringing about political change and unsatisfied with the slow progress of “first generation” media activist initiatives looked to new organizational forms. Concerned not only with countering the “liberal media” but also with contesting such putative liberal agenda incubators as the Ford Foundation and Brookings Institute, this later generation of conservative activists invested in building philanthropic organizations and think tanks of their own, contributing to a diversity of institutions within the conservative movement infrastructure. Indeed, in the latter quarter of the twentieth century, conservative think tanks and foundations emerged as core movement players. These institutions have developed and maintained closely linked and mutually reinforcing relationships with conservative media outlets and other organizations in the rightist network. This chapter describes the mindset of and practical changes implemented by strategic entrepreneurs and philanthropists who were behind the development 123

 

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of a network of conservative nonprofits in the decades following the turmoil of the 1960s civil rights, antiwar, and feminist activism on the left. While a number of conservative thinkers came to similar conclusions about the need to invest in different types of organizations and strategies, a core group came together in the early 1970s around “chief strategist” Paul Weyrich, who was working at the end of the 1960s as a congressional aide. Weyrich and his collaborators took a new approach to conservative organizing that distinguished itself by envisioning and building a large and interconnected network of organizations, embracing the term “New Right” to describe their own unique vision. While the 1970s New Right emphasized domestic moral issues such as abortion and homosexuality more than prior conservative activists, the importance placed on embracing new technologies and pragmatic organizing (portrayed in contrast to trusting in the power of ideas) most differentiated the new cohort. Traditional media became only one component of a larger infrastructure that utilized alternative modes of communication (such as direct mail)1 to spread conservative news. Increased investments from conservative philanthropists and foundations, and the innovative use of direct mail fundraising, supported this proliferation of ideological nonprofit organizations and laid building blocks for conservative media resurgence in the 1990s.

Changes for Conservative Media from the 1960s to 1970s Historians of the Right have long recognized William F.  Buckley’s National Review as vital to the construction of a coherent conservative worldview before any “recognizable conservative movement” existed (Lane, this volume; Nash 1976). In addition to establishing the conservative line on issues such as anticommunism and civil rights, the journal framed a domestic enemy for the nascent movement:  the “Liberal Establishment,” as Julie Lane discusses earlier in this volume. Human Events similarly claimed that media demonstrated a strong liberal bias in the late 1950s to early 1960s, as per Mark Major’s chapter (Nash 1976; Lane, this volume; Major, this volume). The belief in liberal media bias led future senator Jesse Helms to leave his job as executive director of the North Carolina Banker Association to become an executive at the Raleigh-​area WRAL-​TV. Bryan Hardin Thrift (2014) argues that, although the television station did not reach a national audience like Human Events or National Review,

  Mass mailings to supporters and potential supporters by campaigns or organizations used for fundraising, communications, and organizing. 1

 



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its conservative advocacy in the 1960s (especially around race and the Vietnam War) under Helms’s stewardship helped realign the South toward Republicans and, in some ways, anticipated Fox News. Some media leaders recognized the limitations of their own medium and helped to found other types of conservative organizations. National Review publisher William Rusher argued the need for “some sort of conservative movement—​ a movement, not a party—​ marching along beside National Review” (Hemmer 2016). Campuses, with their leftist “radical” activism, offered an attractive venue for investment. Buckley himself had risen to prominence with his bestselling 1951 book God and Man at Yale attacking his alma mater’s liberalism. He was involved with Human Events editor Frank Chodorov’s founding of ISI and facilitated libertarian and conservative students’ founding of YAF (Edwards 2003; Klatch 1999; Schneider 1999; Andrew 1997). The 1964 Republican presidential nomination of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater marked the successful appeal of conservative ideas and—​in spite of his defeat by Democrat Lyndon Johnson—​inspired and trained conservative activists such as YAF campaigners. Sure, conservatives thought, Goldwater lost by a huge margin. But thirty million people still voted for him. In the wake of Goldwater’s defeat, conservatives sought to expand their movement. Buckley, Rusher, and National Review senior editor Frank Meyer collaborated with Human Events editor Tom Winter in founding the American Conservative Union (ACU), which now claims to be the oldest conservative lobbying organization in the United States (Hemmer 2016; Admin 2003). Buckley also launched his television show The Firing Line in 1966, allowing him to reach a mass audience far beyond the core constituency of the National Review (Hendershot 2016). While media leaders and their associated organizations provided a valuable launching point, the rise of the New Right in the 1970s rendered traditional media only one among a variety of modes and types of organizations built to disseminate conservative ideas. Conservative media had successfully entrenched the idea that liberal media bias existed—​to which they offered a necessary antidote—​in not only their supporters but also the broader population (Lane, this volume; Major, this volume). Conservative strategists in the late 1960s and early 1970s remained concerned with the specter of liberal media and campus collectivism, yet focused more attention on the policy impact of the Brookings Institute, perceived as a liberal think tank, and the philanthropic Ford Foundation, blamed for sustaining its operations (Rich 2005; Ricci 1993). This paved the way for the emergence of the think tank, rather than media outlets, at the center of the conservative movement. Conservative organizational entrepreneurs and philanthropists could bypass traditional media—​liberal, moderate, or conservative—​by investing in alternative modes of sharing information. The emergence of direct mail as a widespread fundraising and communications

 

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technique for conservative organizations was a significant media development, along with the role played by conferences, think tanks, and other organizations that put greater weight on public relations (Berlet 1998). Human Events, The Manion Forum, and National Review rarely turned a profit and often survived on donations from sympathetic supporters. Going into the 1970s, these outlets were struggling more than ever with their bottom line (Hemmer 2016). Yet, despite their frequent dependence on donations to make ends meet, these media outlets were not set up as nonprofits. By contrast, for New Right leaders, the nonprofit model emerged as the most effective form for organizing, though they also dabbled largely unsuccessfully with commercial ideological organizations. Nonprofit status allowed organizations to receive tax-​ deductible donations from the large philanthropic foundations established and/​ or directed by wealthy conservative business leaders and heirs. Conservative foundation leaders such as beer magnate Joseph Coors and banking, oil, and aluminum heir Richard Mellon Scaife became convinced that strategic investment in ideologically right organizations could change the political environment (Mayer 2016; Hoplin and Robinson 2008). Combined with direct mail fundraising, these new resources enabled organizations to be founded at a rapid rate and sustained the growth of a movement network. Though media leaders had instigated the founding of the YAF, ISI, and ACU, some resisted this rapid proliferation of organizations because they viewed them as competition for limited resources. Despite their concerns, conservative media activists remained influential within the increasingly competitive and variegated conservative media sphere, even as New Right activists such as Weyrich and Viguerie pursued their own traditional media projects. Magazines, radio, and television remained part of the conservative network, along with media watchdog organizations established to monitor and oppose liberal media bias, such as Accuracy in Media (founded in 1969). Buckley, who continued to mentor young conservatives, relocated The Firing Line to the nonprofit station PBS in 1971, where the show received funding from conservative foundations and aired until 1999 (Hendershot 2016). The National Review continued to influence young conservative writers and inspire the creation of campus publications, from Indiana University’s The Alternative (later renamed the American Spectator) founded in 1967 to the Dartmouth Review founded in 1980 (Spillman 2013).

The Whole Panoply of the Right As the 1960s drew to a close, several influential (or soon-​to-​be prominent) conservatives came independently to similar conclusions regarding the need for a

 



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long-​term, strategic plan to build up right-​wing infrastructure. Future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell, Richard Nixon presidential aide Patrick Buchanan, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) president William J. Baroody, and congressional aides Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner differed seriously over particulars. Yet, all imagined new investments by conservatives and business leaders in a right-​wing infrastructure. Powell viewed liberal faculty as the primary source of an “attack on [the] American Free Enterprise System,” arguing in a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that it was best positioned to coordinate corporations in long-​term strategic counteraction to reshape higher education (Schmitt 2005). When the Washington Post published Powell’s memo in September 1972, Baroody claimed that liberal public policy research centers were the real threat. Baroody and Buchanan both saw the Brookings Institute as a liberal “government-​in-​exile” portraying itself as a nonpartisan think tank, buoyed by lavish funding from the Ford Foundation (Stahl 2016, 68). Baroody envisioned AEI—​founded in 1938 to advance free enterprise—​as the counter to this liberal bias and asked conservative foundations to establish a “marketplace of ideas” by investing in his organization (Stahl 2016, 53–​55). Buchanan, on the other hand, stated firmly in a 1972 postelection memo to Nixon that “AEI is not the answer,” arguing for “something new, initiated in the coming year” (Smith 1991, 197; Stahl 2016, 68). Harder right conservatives viewed AEI as too moderate and insufficiently active in influencing policy, thus opening space for the growth of new right-​ wing think tanks in the 1970s. Baroody viewed it as a strength that AEI had “no label or ideology,” just a commitment to free enterprise, bragging, “right-​wing conservatives say it is too liberal; left-​wing liberals claim it is too conservative” (Stahl 2016, 56). This approach yielded major conservative foundation funding, including $1 million from the Scaife Family Charitable Trust for fiscal year 1972, and an initial $50,000 grant from the supposedly liberal Ford Foundation (Stahl 2016). Unfortunately for Baroody, right-​wing conservatives with deep pockets sought a more ideological approach. An existing AEI donor, beer magnate Joseph Coors, actively sought additional investments to “further the conservative cause” (Hoplin and Robinson 2008, 195). Weyrich, Feulner, and a few collaborators were seeking funding for a conservative research firm to counter Brookings when a letter from Coors’s assistant found its way to them. The result was a $250,000 Coors investment to establish the Heritage Foundation in 1973, with Weyrich as president (Phillips-​Fein 2009). Weyrich and the New Right distinguished themselves by operating from a “movement mindset,” believing that conservatives would benefit from investing in a network of organizations and growing the size of the overall supporter base (Crutchfield and McLeod Grant 2012). According to Weyrich, this mindset was instigated by his attending a civil rights coalition strategy meeting in

 

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1969 while working as press secretary for Colorado Republican senator Gordon Allott. “And there,” Weyrich said, “before my eyes, was revealed the tactics of the left.” Weyrich’s vision began to take shape as he watched collaboration between legislators, activists, the Brookings Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the media. “The whole panoply of the left was there, from nonprofit groups to political action committees,” Weyrich recalled (Regnery 2008, 61). Richard Viguerie credited Weyrich with designing a plan to “reverse-​ engineer the left” (Naylor 2008). Viguerie himself had left his position as YAF executive secretary after Goldwater’s defeat to found his own direct mail business to cater to a number of conservative organizations. He sought to use profits from fundraising for clients such as the ACU, the National Right-​to-​Work Committee, the National Rifle Association (NRA), and conservative political candidates to provide seed loans for new rightist organizations (Viguerie 1981; Viguerie and Franke 2004). With backing from Coors and fundraising from Viguerie’s thriving operation, Weyrich and Viguerie were able to operate as “network entrepreneurs.”2 The successful expansion of the New Right network bore out the effectiveness of a movement-​expansion approach over a purely competitive perspective. Existing groups such as the AEI and ACU maintained (or exceeded) their funding levels despite the founding of similar organizations, like Heritage and Weyrich’s Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (CFSC). An aggressive entrepreneur, Weyrich was involved with the founding of an astonishing number of conservative organizations. In addition to Heritage, from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, these included the CSFC (later renamed the Free Congress Foundation); the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC); the House Republican Study Committee and Senate Steering Committee; Television News Inc.; the Moral Majority; the Religious Roundtable; and the Council for National Policy (CNP), which hosted an invite-​only annual meeting that drew in rightist organizational, media, foundation, political, and business leaders. The Free Congress Foundation launched less formal coordinating groups on foreign policy, economic, and pro-​family issues. Sharing the belief in building relationships and opportunities for coordination, Viguerie encouraged his older clients to make cause with New Right start-​ups, hosting luncheons for his growing list of conservative clients (Group Research Collection 1978). These older clients included the century-​old NRA, taken over in 1977 by its gun rights hardliners eager to become directly involved with a political agenda (Lichtman 2008, 322).3 Viguerie was interested in influencing 2   I use the term “network entrepreneur” to describe an individual who is involved with founding interconnected organizations to create an infrastructure. 3   Elsewhere in this volume, Dawn Gilpin discusses the evolution of the NRA as a media producer, skirting the constraints of mainstream media by creating its own television and other traditional and social media forums.

 



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pre-​existing organizations (though he was rebuffed in trying to gain control over the ACU and Human Events) but found more success in helping start new ones, such as his magazine Conservative Digest and two organizations founded by YAF alumni: the Conservative Caucus, a grassroots lobbying group, and the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), which funded media supporting right-​wing challengers in Republican primaries (Hemmer 2016). When conservative Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981, the self-​identified New Right stayed critical, to the frustration of more sympathetic conservatives at National Review and the American Spectator (Hemmer 2016; York 2001). Yet Heritage enjoyed more access to the Reagan administration, which adopted much of its blueprint for overhauling the federal government. Simultaneously, Heritage attracted regular support from major conservative foundations, bringing in hundreds of thousand dollars—​each—​from the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, the John M.  Olin Foundation, the M.  J. Murdock Foundation, the Pew Freedom Trust, the Starr Foundation, the McKenna Foundation, the J.  M. Foundation, the Adolph Coors Foundation, and two Scaife foundations: Sarah Scaife and Carthage. While this rising tide brought new donors to the AEI, Heritage’s growth and influence outstripped that of its competitor. Conservative foundations donated both to organizations considered within the New Right umbrella—​ including the new evangelical Christian Right recruited by Weyrich and Viguerie going into the 1980s—​and to other aspects of the conservative, neoconservative, and libertarian constellation. The New Right itself sought to make and maintain connections with this broader movement through collaborative venues like the CNP and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Feulner had stronger connections with neoconservatives through his involvement with the ISI. He joined the board of the Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA), an organization founded in 1978 by neoconservative Irving Kristol and William E. Simon, Olin Foundation president, to guide conservative philanthropy. One new media beneficiary of conservative foundation support was the American Spectator, founded in 1967 (as The Alternative) by student conservatives at Indiana University who read the National Review and were active in the YAF. Founder R. Emmett Tyrrell, an Irish Catholic from an active libertarian Republican family, sought to counter and ridicule 1960s leftist student radicals. If, as historian Gregory L. Schneider suggests, the magazine “represented the first shot fired in what would come to be called the ‘culture war’ between the Left and the Right,” it has been grievously understudied for playing such a lofty role (Schneider 1999, 115). “The sprightly magazine from Bloomington helped us grow confident in our movement, energetic in pursuit of our goals, and optimistic about the ultimate outcome of the struggle,” recalled Karl Rove,

 

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an undergraduate at the University of Utah in 1969 (Spillman 2013, 75). While other conservative newspapers were created in the late 1960s, historian Daniel Spillman writes that the American Spectator was the only one to survive and grow, due to the editors’ understanding “that long term success required courting older conservatives and like-​minded antiradicals and raising money from sympathetic benefactors” (Spillman 2013, 62). Editors reached out to and received advice and support from Buckley, Rusher, and Meyer, as well as Irving Kristol, whose son William Kristol went on to cofound the Weekly Standard (Spillman 2013). Ruth Lilly, a pharmaceutical heir based in Indianapolis, not only donated $3,000 to the magazine in 1968 but also provided invaluable advice: that The Alternative register as a nonprofit to allow donations from foundations such as the Lilly Endowment. Scaife enabled the magazine to jump from the campus to a national forum with a $25,000 donation in 1970. Over the next decade, the magazine received over $1 million in direct funding from Scaife, according to journalist Karen Rothmeyer (1981), and hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Lilly Endowment. Larger grants were often designated as funding events such as visiting speakers, supporting the publication’s role as a movement leader (Foundation Center Historical Foundation Collection 1971–​1997).

Marketing Ideas The leaders of the New Right felt keenly the importance of the marketing of ideas through multiple venues, for which direct mail became an important component and a means of maintaining independence from strong-​willed philanthropists or corporate funders.4 Marketing conservative ideas involved “develop[ing] modes of distribution across a broad range of media,” encroaching on the monopoly that an earlier cohort of conservative media leaders had previously enjoyed (Lesage 1998, 27). Chip Berlet (1998) argues that much of right-​wing communications took place in “right-​wing alternative information networks,” in which new ideas are circulated in “conferences and other meetings  .  .  .  field-​tested within right-​wing alternative media such as small-​circulation newsletters and journals” (252). Once “field-​tested,” these ideas and frames would be used more broadly by major right-​wing media outlets, with the hope of eventually jumping into mainstream media discourse. A significant portion of the Heritage budget went to communications, diverging from how policy organizations traditionally allocated their resources; after taking over as Heritage president in 1977, Feulner

  In 1978, of Heritage’s $2.7 million budget, half came from individual donors, one-​third from foundations, and less than one-​fifth from corporations. 4

 



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invested 35 percent to 40 percent of the budget in public relations (The Heritage Foundation 1978). Not one for modesty, Viguerie wrote in his 1981 book The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead, “Frankly, the conservative movement is where it is today because of direct mail” (90). “Direct mail,” he claimed, harking back to established conservative views on media bias, “gave conservatives a way to bypass the liberal ‘gatekeepers’ at the liberal mass media” (109) While direct mail had been used in political campaigns before, Viguerie’s development of a “right of center” list, which reportedly grew to 4.5 million names by 1981, pioneered its strategic use as a primary form of fundraising and communications for a network of nonprofits. Viguerie recognized that direct mail was a medium not just for fundraising but also for advertising. Political scientist R. Kenneth Godwin (1988) finds that political direct mail provides advantages such as the ability to pretest and repeat solicitations, and historian Paul E. Johnson (1998) called direct mail “the single most important method” for interest groups to inform and recruit members. Viguerie required clients to share their lists with him for use in supporting ideologically similar organizations, fostering the development of a larger conservative movement with overlapping supporters. This ran against the existing practice of jealously guarding supporter lists. The National Review only started to rent out its list of active subscribers in the late 1980s (Tønnessen 1999, 133). “Many conservatives have discovered the difference between an organization and a movement,” Viguerie wrote in the November 1975 issue of the Conservative Digest, in an apparent dig at opposition from leaders at groups like the ACU and Human Events (Group Research Collection 1975). In addition to new alternative media ventures, Coors and Weyrich invested substantially in traditional commercial media as a conduit for conservative news and ideas, founding Television News Inc. (TVN) the same year as the Heritage Foundation to produce and distribute right-​wing content nationally. What appeared to be their most expensive failure, TVN burned through $8 million from 1973 to 1975 before shuttering, unable to make an impact on the competitive television syndicate market and turn a profit (Hoplin and Robinson 2008, 203). Yet in the long run, this failure turned out to be one of conservative media’s greatest success stories. In its final year, TVN brought on Nixon media consultant Roger Ailes—​the future CEO of Fox News—​as its news director. In 1970, a memo from a Nixon official outlining how to create “pro-​administration” news and counter network “prejudices” influenced Ailes (Cook 2011). TVN shared notable similarities with the future Fox News, such as the mission to counter the perceived liberal left slant of the news, and the slogan “fair and balanced” (Haberman 2017). Other innovative uses of media in the 1970s contributed to the rise of the “pro-​family” movement and the Christian Right, core elements of the New

 

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Right movement. Even relatively small lists could trigger a powerful campaign or movement with the right framing and rhetoric. Phyllis Schlafly’s successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment started with a critical 1972 article in her 3,500-​recipient newsletter, the Phyllis Schlafly Report. It presented the amendment as a threat to traditional housewives’ ability to stay home and raise children (Critchlow 2005). Evangelical Francis Schaeffer traveled from church to church sharing his 1976 documentary, How Should We Then Live?, which sought to convince Protestants to adopt the Catholic position against abortion, attacked “secular humanism,” and criticized disengagement from the political sphere (Worthen 2013, 214). Schaeffer is credited with convincing future leaders of the Christian Right—​Reverends Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and Pat Robertson—​ of the need to become politically involved on moral issues. “Dr. Schaeffer shattered that world of isolation for me,” Falwell later recalled (Williams 2010, 174). Another future conservative evangelical leader, James Dobson, was hosting the Focus on the Family radio program, which would eventually reach millions of listeners, develop into a multi-​million-​dollar organization, and launch the Family Research Council, one of the most influential conservative lobbying entities (Williams 2010). Conservative foundations’ media investments also included the Public Interest, a domestic policy journal, and the National Interest, a foreign policy journal, both cofounded by Irving Kristol; the New Criterion, a critical cultural review journal; Crisis, a magazine for Catholic neoconservatives; Christianity Today, published by conservative evangelicals; and the libertarian Reason magazine. They funded programming through Radio America, a conservative talk radio network, and television programming, including Buckley’s Firing Line; economic education and pro-​business programs; and PBS documentaries on political and economic issues. They also invested in authors like Charles Murray, then at the Manhattan Institute, who would go on to write The Bell Curve in 1994, arguing for innate racial differences in intelligence. They also provided support for training the next generation of conservative journalists and commentators on college and university campuses, including the National Journalism Center, founded by the ACU in 1977, and the IEA, which launched a student journalism program to engage in the “battle of ideas” in 1980.

Extreme Rhetoric, Student Media, and Conservative Funding The National Review was seen as respectable conservatism, in contrast to existing Far Right groups like the conspiracist John Birch Society, even though, as Robert

 



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Greene writes, in the late 1950s Buckley was printing commentary claiming that whites were “the advanced race” and justified in enforcing segregation. At the time, however, this type of racism carried more mainstream palatability. By the 1980s, conservatives “would have to adjust to a ‘new normal,’ where support for racism was universally frowned upon in the public sphere,” pushing the National Review to accept civil rights and adopt the ideology of “color-​blindness” to oppose policies bent on correcting racial injustice (Greene, this volume). The widespread use of direct mail pushed rightist rhetoric in a more extreme direction, replacing overt racism with a new emphasis on abortion and homosexuality in the New Right. Multiple scholars (Godwin 1988; Shields 2007; Godwin and Mitchell 1984)  have found that direct mail relies on fear and emotional appeals to push already sympathetic readers into donating or taking action, moving away from a format of reasoned debate more prevalent in conservative journals like National Review. To illustrate this, Godwin quotes from a letter from the NCPAC signed by Senator Jesse Helms: “Your tax dollars are being used for grade school classes that teach our children that CANNIBALISM, WIFE-​SWAPPING, and the MURDER of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior.”5 Political scientist Jon A. Shields’s study of prominent 1990s Christian Right organizations finds that their direct mail uses loaded phrases like “militant homosexuals” and represents liberal opposition as depraved and dishonest actors involved in “baby harvesting” or trying to “destroy marriage” (Shields 2007, 94). The two most successful magazines to come out of the upswings in conservative campus publications at the end of the 1960s and again in the 1980s—​ the Alternative/​American Spectator and the Dartmouth Review—​distinguished themselves by extreme and offensive misogynist, anti-​gay, and racist content. The American Spectator, which moved from the campus to a national stage in the 1970s, took a secular approach that focused less on abortion than on attacking feminists (including disparaging their appearance) and the equal rights movement. Its deeply anti-​gay content tended to eschew religious moralizing. In his 2013 dissertation on the American Spectator, historian Daniel Spillman finds that these attacks, frequently characterized by spiteful mockery, were couched, in part, as opposing New Left radicals. This allowed the magazine to appeal both to the New/​Christian Right and to more secular or Jewish libertarian and neoconservative writers (Spillman 2013). With this type of content, the American Spectator pulled in approximately $1.5  million from conservative foundations during the 1980s including the Coors, Olin, Bradley, Scaife, and Starr foundations, though it remained small in circulation, well behind the National Review   Mailings were matched “according to their use of fear, guilt, [and] name-​calling” and it was found that this “pervades all types of direct mailings” regardless of persuasion (Godwin 1988, 531–​536). 5

 

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(Foundation Center Historical Foundation Collection 1980–​1989). Editor-​in-​ chief R. Emmett Tyrrell’s piece “Call It Women’s Glib” provides an illustrative example of the type of vitriolic content it leaned toward: “What passed for ideas in the women’s movement were some of the scrawniest specimens of cognition ever spied” (Tyrrell 1979). Despite continued conservative claims of liberal media bias, this piece was excerpted in the New York Times from a book of his edited works, and Tyrrell had a regular column at the Washington Post for a time in the early 1980s (York 2001). Supporting new young writers just as the earlier generation of conservative media activists had supported his magazine, Tyrrell joined the advisory board of a student magazine founded in 1980 on a small campus in New Hampshire: the Dartmouth Review. One of the Dartmouth Review’s first actions was to mount an ongoing campaign to demand the restoration of the Dartmouth Indian mascot (removed in the 1970s for its offensive stereotyping), setting a precedent for the tone that would mark its pages. Immediately entering into a battle with Dartmouth College over the right to use the institution’s name enabled editor Dinesh D’Souza to score points in the conservative movement by condemning the administration’s actions as a “tyrannical, reactionary attack on first amendment rights” (Bloche 1981). D’Souza and Laura Ingraham, another Review editor in the early 1980s, published articles outing gay students, condemning affirmative action (written in a mockery of Black English), and interviewing a Ku Klux Klan leader—​complete with a staged photo of a lynching (Lane 1982). Beyond the printed page, in 1986 ten Dartmouth Review staffers were suspended for using sledgehammers to destroy an anti-​apartheid shantytown on the campus green (Wald 1986). The magazine benefitted from significant support from nonstudent media including the National Review, right-​wing politicians, and funding organizations. One of its cofounders was the son of National Review senior editor Jeffrey Hart, who served as faculty adviser. The masthead regularly thanked Buckley, who connected student editors to the broader movement and featured the newspaper in his national column. The advisory board included Patrick Buchanan, William Rusher, and Republican representative Jack Kemp (Clendinen 1981). President Ronald Reagan, writing to a former Dartmouth Review editor working in his administration in 1981, applauded the paper as having “started an important movement” (Bloche 1981). Foundation support accompanied the accolades, starting with $10,000 from the Olin Foundation that year. The newspaper joined the IEA’s “Collegiate Network,” which provided access to funding, advice on running a student publication, and invitations to conferences (cosponsored by the Liberty Fund) that connected them with other student journalists and conservative personalities. By 1986, IEA was dedicating 50 percent of its $1 million budget to the Collegiate Network (CN) and its editorial internship program.

 



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IEA bragged in its annual report about supporting student publications that “expanded the range of viewpoints at many of the nation’s top schools, including every Ivy League campus and many of the major state universities” (Institute for Educational Affairs 1986). Other significant CN members included the Cornell Review, cofounded in 1984 by Ann Coulter, who also attended the ACU’s National Journalism Center (NJC). The paper’s racist content led Kemp to resign from the advisory board, and some conservatives—​including the IEA—​hastily distanced themselves following the shantytown embarrassment. But they did not go far. By 1987, the Dartmouth Review once again appeared on the list of CN publications, and its extreme positions drew greater funding. The target of one Dartmouth Review article, one of the college’s few Black professors, had sued Ingraham for libel but dropped the lawsuit. A confrontation between members of the Dartmouth Review and the professor, William Cole, in the classroom resulted in the suspension of three students for harassment. When two of the suspended students sued the college in state and federal court for violating free speech and due process and for racial discrimination (both complainants were white), the paper raked in additional funding from foundations (Casey 1989). Olin’s support jumped to $100,000, followed, in 1989, by another $25,000 grant and $150,000 from the Bradley Foundation, payable over two years, to “support the defense of academic freedom and responsibility through legal fees incurred by the Dartmouth Review” (Bradley Foundation 1990). The students were reinstated, on grounds of disciplinary committee bias, and Professor Cole resigned the following year (Wall Street Journal 1989; New York Times 1990). The American Spectator and Dartmouth Review acted as training and recruitment pipelines to careers in the conservative movement. American Spectator authors went on to become speechwriters for Vice President Spiro Agnew, President Richard Nixon, and President Gerald Ford, while the next generation of Dartmouth Review alumni landed positions with the Reagan White House, the Heritage Foundation, and the Wall Street Journal (Blumenthal 1986). D’Souza went on to work at Heritage’s Policy Review, the Reagan administration, and the American Enterprise Institute, and to write books (Matthews 2016). D’Souza, Ingraham, and Coulter all went on to become right-​wing commentators and bestselling authors. Rich Lowry, founder of the CN publication Virginia Advocate in the late 1980s, is as of 2018 editor of the National Review (Collegiate Network 2018a). Margaret “Maggie” Gallagher, an alumnus of the CN publication Yale Political Monthly, an IEA editorial intern placed at National Review, and an NJC participant, established a career writing articles, then books, then as the president of the anti-​gay National Organization for Marriage (NOM) (Collegiate Network 2018b).

 

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Political Correctness and the 1990s Media Resurgence In 1995, Beth Shulman, a labor lawyer and activist, asked, “Why have progressives virtually lost their voices in serious public policy debates?” For an answer, she looked to the funding enjoyed by the conservative independent press, finding that from 1990 to 1992 the American Spectator, National Interest, Public Interest, and New Criterion pulled in more than $2.7 million in foundation grants, in comparison to only a little more than a quarter million dollars to the leading progressive publications (The Nation, Mother Jones, Progressive, and In These Times). This did not represent a discrepancy in resources, but rather one of priorities:  the four biggest funders of the Right (Bradley, Scaife, Olin, and Carthage) had approximately $700 million in assets, compared to over $3 billion in combined assets for four comparable liberal foundations. Shulman reasons, “The effort that other magazines must put into circulation and advertising growth is liberated for a more important mission: increased influence on popular opinion and public policy” (Shulman 1995). The 1990s media resurgence in conservative media occurred across multiple mediums—​magazines, book publishing, talk radio, and television—​as conservatives returned to a counterestablishment position following the Reagan presidency (Hemmer 2016). Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, despite distinguishing himself from movement conservatives, became conservatism’s loudest and most influential voice by relying on the same sort of vitriolic rhetoric developed in direct mail, the American Spectator, and the Dartmouth Review in decades prior (Hemmer 2016). Limbaugh picked up and broadcast content from the American Spectator to his wider audience, instigated by the magazine’s degrading coverage of Anita Hill, an African American law professor who testified before Congress in 1991 that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her in the workplace (Spillman 2013). The magazine’s content attracted dedicated support from Scaife to target the Clintons for similar hit pieces, as readership jumped from thirty thousand in early 1992 to two hundred thousand in late 1993 (Foundation Center Historical Foundation Collection; Spillman 2013). David Brock, the author of the article disparaging Hill, followed up with a bestselling book, which even received positive reviews in the Washington Post and New York Times, despite being portrayed by conservatives as a bastion of liberal bias (Brock 1992). Other popular books formed part of the media resurgence, including many published by the conservative Free Press and supported by foundation funding. One of these was D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education: The Politics of Sex and Race on Campus, attacking “political correctness” at US universities.

 



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Hill’s testimony threatened the rightward push of the judiciary sought by conservatives, such as lawyers and academics in the Federalist Society, and the network of varied nonprofit organizations and media created in the preceding two decades came to bear in Thomas’s defense (Teles 2008). Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation churned out press releases defending Thomas, who later made a special appearance to thank his supporters on the Free Congress Foundation’s National Empowerment Television (NET), a new attempt by Weyrich to launch a conservative television network (Toobin 1993). NET attracted programming from influential conservative individuals and organizations, including Representative Newt Gingrich (as he set the stage for the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress), the Heritage Foundation, Accuracy in Media, and the NRA. Though NET never took off and closed down in 2000, Weyrich was not wrong about the concept—​or the timing. NET demonstrated the opportunities for a conservative television outlet just a few years before Rupert Murdock decided to invest in Roger Ailes and Fox News, which continues the tradition of WRAL-​T V in conservative advocacy and claiming to balance out liberal media bias (Swint 2008). Looking at the results of the conservative movement infrastructure in 2012, political scientist Richard Meagher writes, “Conservative talk radio, magazines, television networks, and internet sites have numerous connections, both direct and indirect, to the think tanks, interest groups and advocacy organizations, academic research centers, and foundations that develop and promote the Right’s key ideas and policies. . . . [T]‌hey are well-​integrated through years of political organizing” (Meagher 2012, 470). Decades of conservative philanthropy and nonprofit media innovation ultimately paved the way for commercially successful ventures like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, both of whom built upon the expanded audience for conservative news and commentary fostered by the New Right proliferation of conservative institutions and media. New technological innovations, such as online publishing, podcasting, and YouTube, provide low-​cost ways for right-​wing media personalities to establish a profile, building a profitable career through speaking fees, lucrative book deals, and advertising on their own programs. As an integrated network, conservatives move among different types of organizations. Dartmouth Review editor Laura Ingraham went on to work as a Reagan speechwriter, and she was one of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s law clerks before returning to conservative media as a television and radio host (Toobin 1993). While Fox News, like media outlets of the 1950s and 1960s, plays a leadership role in the conservative movement, it is in communication and collaboration with the broader infrastructure of think tanks, lobbying groups, foundations, and other entities that participate in the advancement of a right-​wing agenda.

 

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References Admin. 2003. “CPAC over 30 Years: Conservatives Have Come a Long Way.” Last modified February 3, 2003. http://​humanevents.com/​2003/​02/​03/​cpac-​over-​30-​yearsbrconservatives-​have-​ come-​a-​long-​way/​. Andrew, John A., III. 1997. The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Institute for Educational Affairs. 1986. A Year of Renewal:  Annual Report of the Institute for Educational Affairs. Washington, DC. Berlet, Chip. 1998. “Who’s Mediating the Storm? Right-​Wing Alternative Information Networks.” In Culture, Media, and the Religious Right, edited by Linda Kintz and Julia Lesage, 249–​273. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bloche, Charles D. 1981. “Reagan Note Boots Dartmouth Review.” Harvard Crimson, October 17. Blumenthal, Sidney. 1986. “Conservatives Debate Style, Tactics After Dartmouth Incident.” Washington Post, February 6. Bradley Foundation. 1990. Report of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.: August 1988–​ July 1990. Foundation Center Historical Foundation Collection. Brock, David. 1992. “The Real Anita Hill.” American Spectator, March. LexisNexis Academic. Casey, John. 1989. “At Dartmouth the Clash of ’89.” New York Times, February 26. Clendinen, Dudley. 1981. “Conservative Paper Stirs Dartmouth.” New York Times, October 13. Collegiate Network. 2018a. “Conservative Transparency.” Accessed March 13, 2018. http://​conservativetransparency.org/​org/​collegiate-​network/​. Collegiate Network. 2018b. “Prominent CN Alumni.” Accessed March 13, 2018. https://​www. collegiatenetwork.org/​alum. Cook, John. 2011. “Roger Ailes Secret Nixon-​Era Blueprint for Fox News.” Gawker, June 30. http://​gawker.com/​5814150/​roger-​ailes-​secret-​nixon-​era-​blueprint-​for-​fox-​news. Critchlow, Donald T. 2005. Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatives:  A Woman’s Crusade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Crutchfield, Leslie R., and Heather McLeod Grant. 2012. Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-​ Impact Nonprofits. Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-​Bass. D’Souza, Dinesh. 1991. Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New York: The Free Press. Edwards, Lee. 2003. Educating for Liberty:  The First Half-​Century of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. Godwin, R. Kenneth. 1988. “The Structure, Content and Use of Political Direct Mail.” Polity 20 (3): 527–​538. doi:10.2307/​3234875. Godwin, R. Kenneth, and Robert Cameron Mitchell. 1984. “The Implications of Direct Mail for Political Organizations.” Social Science Quarterly 65 (3): 829–​839. “Foundation Center Historical Foundation Collection.” Ruth Lilly Special Collection and Archives. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University–​Purdue University Indianapolis. “Group Research Collection.” Rare Book and Manuscript Library. New  York, NY:  Columbia University. Haberman, Clyde. 2017. “Roger Ailes, Who Built Fox News into an Empire, Dies at 77.” New York Times, May 18. https://​www.nytimes.com/​2017/​05/​18/​business/​media/​roger-​ailes-​dead. html. Hemmer, Nicole. 2016. Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media Activism and the Transformation of American Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hendershot, Heather. 2016. Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line. New York: Broadside Books. The Heritage Foundation. 1978. “Where the New Ideas Are Coming From . . . Fifth Anniversary 1974–​1978.”

 



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Hoplin, Nicole, and Ron Robinson. 2008. Funding Fathers: The Unsung Heroes of the Conservative Movement. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. Johnson, Paul E. 1998. “Interest Group Recruiting:  Finding Members and Keeping Them.” In Interest Group Politics, 5th ed., edited by Allan J. Cigler and Burdett A. Loomis. Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly Press. Klatch, Rebecca. 1999. A Generation Divided:  The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lane, Chuck. 1982. “Crying Out in Ignorance.” Harvard Crimson, June 7. Lesage, Julia. 1998. “Christian Media.” In Media, Culture, and the Religious Right, edited by Linda Kintz and Julia Lesage, 21–​50. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lichtman, Alan. 2008. White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Matthews, Dylan. 2016. “Dinesh D’Souza, America’s Greatest Conservative Troll, Explained.” Vox, March 7. https://​www.vox.com/​2014/​10/​8/​6936717/​dinesh-​dsouza-​explained. Mayer, Jane. 2016. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Doubleday. Meagher, Richard J. 2012. “The ‘Vast Right-​ Wing Conspiracy’:  Media and Conservative Networks.” New Political Science 34 (4): 469–​484. Nash, George H. 1976. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. New York: Basic Books. Naylor, Brian. 2008. “Conservative Icon Paul Weyrich Dies.” NPR, December 18. https://​www. npr.org/​templates/​story/​story.php?storyId=98467654. New York Times. 1990. “Target of Paper’s Barbs Resigns at Dartmouth.” August 22. http://​www. nytimes.com/​1990/​08/​22/​us/​education-​target-​of-​paper-​s-​barbs-​resigns-​at-​dartmouth. html. Phillips-​Fein, Kim. 2009. Invisible Hands:  The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. New York and London: W. W. Norton. Regnery, Alfred S. 2008. Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism. New York: Threshold Editions. Ricci, David. 1993. The Transformation of American Politics: The New Washington and the Rise of Think Tanks. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rich, Andrew. 2005. “War of Ideas:  Why Mainstream and Liberal Foundations and the Think Tanks They Support Are Losing the War of Ideas in American Politics.” Stanford Social Innovation Review 3 (1): 18–​25. Rothmeyer, Karen. 1981. “Citizen Scaife.” Columbia Journalism Review. July/​August 1981. Schmitt, Mark. 2005. “The Legend of the Powell Memo.” American Prospect. April 27. https://​ prospect.org/​article/​legend-​powell-​memo Schneider, Gregory L. 1999. Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right. New York: New York University Press. Shields, Jon A. 2007. “Between Passion and Deliberation: The Christian Right and Democratic Ideals.” Political Science Quarterly 122 (1): 89–​113. Shulman, Beth. 1995. “Foundations for a Movement.” FAIR, March. https://​fair.org/​extra/​ foundations-​for-​a-​movement/​. Smith, James A. 1991. The Idea Brokers:  Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite. New York: Free Press. Spillman, Daniel. 2013. “The Conservative Baby Boomers’ Magazine: A History of The American Spectator and the Conservative Intellectual Movement, 1967–​2001.” Dissertation, Emory University. Stahl, Jason. 2016. Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture Since 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Swint, Kerwin. 2008. Dark Genius: The Influential Career of Legendary Political Operative and Fox News Founder Roger Ailes. New York: Sterling.

 

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Teles, Steven M. 2008. The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thrift, Bryan Hardin. 2014. Conservative Bias: How Jesse Helms Pioneered the Rise of Right-​Wing Media and Realigned the Republican Party. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Tønnessen, Alf Tomas. 1999. How Two Political Entrepreneurs Helped Create the American Conservative Movement, 1973–​1981: The Ideas of Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press. Toobin, Jeffrey. 1993. “The Burden of Clarence Thomas.” New  Yorker, September 27. https://​ www.newyorker.com/​magazine/​1993/​09/​27/​the-​burden-​of-​clarence-​thomas. Tyrrell, R. Emmett, Jr. 1979. “Call It Women’s Glib.” New  York Times. April 16. https://​www. nytimes.com/​1979/​04/​16/​archives/​call-​it-​womens-​glib.html Viguerie, Richard. 1981. The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead. Falls Church, VA: Viguerie Co. Viguerie, Richard, and David Franke. 2004. America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power. Chicago: Bonus Books. Wald, Matthew L. 1986. “Dartmouth Suspends 12 for Attack on Shanties.” New  York Times, February 12. http://​www.nytimes.com/​1986/​02/​12/​us/​dartmouth-​suspends-​12-​for-​ attack-​on-​shanties.html. Wall Street Journal. 1989. “Dartmouth Ordered to Lift Suspension of Two Ex-​Editors.” January 4. Williams, Daniel K. 2010. God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right. New York: Oxford University Press. Worthen, Molly. 2013. The Apostles of Reason:  The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. York, Byron. 2001. “The Life and Death of The American Spectator.” The Atlantic. https://​ www.theatlantic.com/​magazine/​archive/​2001/​11/​the-​life-​and-​death-​of-​the-​american-​ spectator/​302343/​.

 

8

The British Right-​Wing Mainstream and the European Referendum Angel a Phillips

The UK press has always been deeply partisan and the subject of Europe has been particularly polarizing, so the 2016 European referendum offers insight into how the right-​wing establishment press influences the country’s political agenda. Right-​wing media in the United Kingdom have the advantage of being firmly established, with a pre-​existing audience and a clearly understood position in the news field. They were therefore uniquely placed to run a campaign against membership of the European Union without any of the disadvantages of being fringe players. They were able to connect with disaffected voters both in print and via social media, where their stories were widely circulated. These stories then set the agenda for television, which produced the necessary amplification to bridge the online social media bubbles. This chapter considers the role of the press in both setting the Leave agenda and activating anti-​establishment sentiment among disaffected citizens. It will also describe how the BBC, the most popular and most widely trusted news source in the United Kingdom, assisted this process because of the way in which it interpreted its role as an impartial intermediary.

Background In the context of liberal theories of the press, the rise of Internet journalism in the United States was initially seen as an overdue correction to a public sphere that has for many years represented only an imagined center of politics, adhering to a view of journalism in which a form of “strategic objectivity” has taken the place of political debate (Gitlin 1980; Patterson and Donsbach 1993). In the early days of the Internet it was hoped that ease of both access and distribution 141

 

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would give rise to welcome change, bringing in new entrants, breaking up the media oligopolies, challenging the power elite, and giving rise to something more closely resembling an idealized public sphere. Technical changes in the shape of cable networks and the Internet have indeed disrupted the field by lowering the cost of entry and distribution, while also undermining the commercial funding base of the traditional mainstream media. While the traditional liberal press maintained the costs of reporting, the disrupters moved into the cheaper space of comment, learning how to make use of the rising tide of news personalization systems and social media (Elvestad and Phillips 2018). The apparent connection of these personalized news services to the political polarization of news and opinion has been the subject of a large body of research (Prior 2007; Pariser 2011; Sunstein 2009; Elvestad and Phillips 2018). However, much of this research fails to look beyond the borders of the United States. Polarization in the United States accelerated first as a result of deregulation, which allowed for more fragmented and competitive broadcasting and more individualized news delivery (Prior 2007; Jamieson and Cappella 2008; Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012). The shift from a news media environment that tended to reinforce and reflect the dominant ideology of the two main parties (Gitlin 1980) to a fragmented and divided media system, in which core supporters of the two major parties no longer share the same media, has been swift, as many other contributors to this volume will attest. In Europe on the other hand, partisan news has a long history, complemented by regulated systems of national broadcasting (Hallin and Mancini 2004). The European media systems have also been disrupted but have so far avoided the US levels of polarization largely because of role played by regulated broadcasting (Fletcher 2017; EBU Media Intelligence Service 2016). Studies of party identification comparing the United States and Britain found that between 1960 and 2008, “not only have Americans become more polarized over time, they now also show greater animus for the out-​party than do the British, even though party identification in Britain is an expression of both political identity and class identity” (Iyengar et al. 2012, 418). Now, according to a Reuters Institute survey (Fletcher 2017), the US news media is the most polarized of twenty-​two countries surveyed. While regulated public broadcasters continue to provide a centrist presence in the news landscape, they are not immune from the pressures of well-​capitalized campaigns emanating from the populist press. The European Referendum campaign demonstrates how political and commercial power have not disappeared from the media space. They have merely evolved to exploit the new personalized delivery systems to their own political and commercial advantage (Elvestad and Phillips 2018). The United Kingdom provides a useful case study of how a

 



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right-​wing commercial press managed to maintain its hegemony in an increasingly competitive online media market in spite of a regulated broadcasting sector. While the UK commercial press has struggled financially with the loss of advertising revenue, which all news media have experienced as advertising has moved to the Internet platforms, it has not lost its audience (Curran et al. 2013). In 2016, the referendum year, the combined monthly audience for the pro-​Brexit popular press—​the Sun, Mail, and Express—​was sixty-​seven million, while the Daily Mirror, the only popular newspaper to support the Remain campaign, was twenty-​eight million (Ofcom 2017). Among the more up-​market newspapers, the pro-​Remain Guardian and the pro-​Brexit Telegraph also had large online followings, each of a similar size. However, no examination of the news media in the United Kingdom makes sense without an understanding of the unique role of the BBC. When Internet users were asked “Which of the following do you use for news?,” 57  percent mentioned the BBC, while 31 percent mentioned newspapers and 27 percent Facebook (Ofcom 2017, 38). Only 9 percent said that social media was their sole source of news. In analyzing the British system of news media, Hallin and Mancini refer to the role of the BBC, but they do not emphasize its importance as the most popular, and widely trusted, news provider. While trust has declined in recent years, the BBC can still be described as a “trust anchor” (Wessells et al. 2018) for 61 percent of the audience, rising to 67 percent among radio listeners (Ofcom 2017). Where news is polarized, people tend to trust news outlets that accord with their own political views (Elvestad and Phillips 2018), but the BBC is accessed more or less equally by those on both left and the right of the political spectrum (Newman, Levy, and Nielsen 2015, 57). In the United Kingdom, impartiality in the delivery of television news is considered important by 90 percent of survey respondents (Ofcom 2017, 79), and the high audience share and expectations of impartiality mean that the television news, and the BBC in particular, is expected to play a key role in the delivery of information for citizens. There is no similar national news organization in the United States that is capable of speaking to both Democrats and Republicans (Fletcher 2017, 38; Benkler et al. 2017). It therefore seems reasonable to hypothesize that the sheer weight of the BBC coverage on air and also online, the level of trust accorded to the BBC, and the ability of the BBC to reach across online filter bubbles would ensure that the debate about the European referendum would have been relatively well informed, in spite of the dominant position of the popular right-​wing press in terms of circulation and reach. In what follows, I will argue, however, that the traditional right-​wing press effectively set the agenda for the Brexit debate across all channels, including television, because of its continuing dominant cultural position in the journalism field.

 

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The British Press and the Political Right The recent history of the British popular press is closely tied up with the family fortunes of four press magnates:  Lords Northcliffe and Rothermere, brothers who launched the Daily Mail in 1896 and then the Daily Mirror in 1903; Lord Beaverbrooke, who took over the Daily Express in 1916; and Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Sun newspaper in 1969. There have been others, but these four men have had an unprecedented influence as the proprietors of mass market popular newspapers that have each, in their time, been the highest-​selling newspapers in the country and all of which are still influential today both in print and increasingly online. As Curran and Seaton (1997) explained: “What made the press magnates different is that they sought to use their papers, not as levers of power within the political parties, but as instruments of power against political parties” (49). Of these, only the Daily Mirror, from its position on the moderate left, has maintained a relatively ambivalent position on Europe. During the 1970s, it tended to view the European project with skepticism but in general gave Europe little coverage. Since the turn of the century, coverage has gradually increased, the tone has become largely pro-​European, but attention has been skimpy compared to that in the Daily Mail, Sun, and Express (Copeland and Copsey 2017, 721), which have opposed membership. The Daily Mail, which has been particularly vehement in its opposition to Europe, has a long history of supporting right-​wing causes. Lord Rothermere, who became full owner of the Mail in 1922, was initially a supporter of Hitler (Martin 1934). He used the newspaper to campaign against granting asylum to Jewish refugees (Curran and Seaton 2010, 49). The Daily Mail has continued to oppose immigration and bait Labour politicians with strategic use of what would now be described as “fake” news stories (Curran, Gaber, and Petley 2005). In 1992 (the year its longest-​serving editor, Paul Dacre, took up his post), a special rebuttal site was established by the European Union to correct inaccurate stories. The chief offenders were the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, and the Daily Express (Economist Data Team 2016). According to the European Union: British newspapers have accused the European Union of banning, among many other things: A-​levels, bankrupt (the word), coffee drinking (unless moderate), double decker buses, elections on Thursdays, firefighters’ poles, gin in square bottles, herbal remedies, imperial measures, jam jars being reused, kilts being described as menswear, lollipop ladies’ sticks, milk of magnesia, non-​nappy wearing cows, off licenses (on weekdays), Peter Pan, the Queen (from UK passports),

 



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rhododendrons, steam trains, toilets (traditional British), Union Flags (on meat packaging), violin strings (made from gut), wood-​burning ovens, xylophones (toy), yoghurt (in schools) and . . . (yes, there is one for “z”) zoo advertisements (which fail to include images of elephants). (European Commission 2015) Some researchers have concluded that the rise in Euro-​skepticism in the British public is a direct product of the partisan press. For Daddow (2012), the end of Thatcherism in 1989 was the point at which the British right-​wing press (and the News International press in particular) embraced hardline Euro-​ skepticism and effectively created a Eurosceptic public. Since then, the Daily Mail, The Express, and the Sun have maintained what he refers to as a drumbeat of “vigorously partisan hostility bordering on a nationalist and in some arenas xenophobic approach to coverage of European affairs” (1219). But the pattern of polling over thirty-​five years does not suggest a direct relationship. Public opinion has fluctuated, but there has always been a significant level of anti-​European sentiment, which was at its strongest in the late 1970s, shortly after the referendum in which the country voted to stay in the Common Market. At that point the press was relatively unconcerned about Europe. Over the succeeding years, public opinion in most years has marginally favored staying in, but the overwhelming sense has been of a public largely uninterested in the European Union (Copsey and Haughton 2014, 77; Ipsos MORI 2016). The proportion who favored leaving hit a low point of 30 percent in 1991, two years after Thatcher’s fall from power (Ipsos MORI 2016). Then opinion remained pretty evenly divided in spite of the increasingly vitriolic press campaign. When in 2013 David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, promised a referendum on Europe, it was not to attract votes so much as to unify the Conservative Party, where a fractious right wing continued to agitate about issues of sovereignty. When the referendum was announced, the public majority in favor of remaining in the European Union started to rise and stayed ahead well into the referendum campaign (Ipsos MORI 2016). There is no doubt that the right-​wing press became increasingly aggressive about Europe during the 1990s, but it could be that they were opportunistically responding to, rather than leading, the growing skepticism of a minority of Conservative members of Parliament MPs (Copsey and Haughton 2014). The launch of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in 1993 provided opportunities for sensationalism that has always been catnip for popular journalism. The UKIP’s flamboyant leader, Nigel Farage, provided both the personalization and the conflict that the topic of Europe had until then failed to produce. He has never been elected as an MP; indeed, the only MP his party has had was a

 

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defector from the Conservative Party. His role has always been that of provocateur: a thorn in the side of the establishment. Farage became a man for all seasons: a clown, a villain, or a hero, depending on which news outlet was discussing him. Like Donald Trump, Farage indulges in “ ‘strategies of provocation’ aimed at garnering sensational news coverage” (Wodak 2014, 102). In a 2015 leadership debate he suggested that foreigners with HIV were coming to the United Kingdom with the specific intention of getting free treatment paid for by the taxpayer. Deliberately provocative statements travel particularly well in social media, where they will often be repeated to build rapport with like-​minded people (Elvestad and Phillips 2018). They also have a disproportionate impact on the news agenda. The HIV comment was widely discussed across all shades of media opinion and was the most widely tweeted comment of the debate (Dennison and Goodwin 2015, 168). Just as Trump attracted media coverage during his election campaign for his provocative tweets (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017), Farage, in spite of the fact that his party attracted only 12.6  percent of the vote at the previous election, got considerably more coverage during the referendum campaign than did Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, which had attracted 30.6 percent of the vote at the last election (Centre for Research in Communication and Culture [CRCC] 2016; Moore and Ramsay 2017). The mainstream media in the United States were mesmerized by provocative late-​night tweets produced by Trump. The UK media, irrespective of political leanings, were fascinated by Farage, who presumed to be anti-​elitist while at the same time sporting the uniform of an old-​fashioned city broker. As with Trump, the majority of coverage of Farage and his party was negative (Deacon and Wring 2016), but he nevertheless changed the news agenda by propelling the issue of immigration from the margins into the mainstream of the debate because, as Cohen (1963) observed, the news media “may not be successful in telling people what to think but [they are] stunningly successful in telling readers what to think about” (13). While the organization of the UK political system makes it hard for an insurgent party to make inroads during an election, the structure of a referendum with its binary vote allowed the issue of immigration to become central to the referendum debate.

The British Media and the European Referendum A study by the Loughborough Centre for Research in Communication and Culture (2016) analyzed media coverage of the referendum in the period before the vote. Examining a weighted evaluation of the press coverage, taking into consideration circulation and strength of partisanship, they found an 82 percent

 



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circulation advantage in favor of leaving the union. Most of that coverage came from the Sun, The Express, the Daily Mail, and the Telegraph. The online reach of the right-​wing press, as mentioned previously, was also considerably greater than that of the pro-​Remain press. Analysis of Twitter in the pre-​referendum period tends to confirm the dominance of the mainstream media, which was regularly referenced by the Vote Leave campaign (Llewellyn and Cram 2015). More detailed analysis found that 63.9 percent of URLs shared on Twitter came from professional news organizations. Items considered junk news made up only a little over 4 percent of the total (Narayanan et al. 2017). It is worth noting here for comparison that, during the 2016 US elections, professional news content made up only 20 percent of Twitter links, and the same number of links went to a group composed of junk news, WikiLeaks, and Russia (Howard et al. 2017). This suggests that the appetite for sensationalized partisan news in the United Kingdom was satisfied by existing providers and that the audience was not searching for (or being found by) external actors or new entrants. Research on the political engagement of those who access news online found that this group is more likely than those who primarily watch television to be politically active but less likely to be politically knowledgeable (Gil de Zúñiga, Weeks, and Ardèvol-​Abreu 2017; Hutchens et  al. 2016; Conroy and Feezell 2012). Further research suggests that as more politically active news seekers share material, political partisanship intensifies (Stroud 2007, 2010; Iyengar and Westwood 2015). The preponderance of pro-​Leave tweets suggests that political engagement was higher on the Leave side as these people circulated material, most of which was coming from mainstream news sources and political organizations and much of which concerned immigration. Indeed, the most shared story in the run-​up to the referendum came from the Daily Express (Waterson 2017).

The Role of the Broadcasters Broadcasters were bound by regulation that required them to be impartial on political issues, and the researchers found that over 80 percent of coverage was balanced or neutral with a slight bias toward the Remain position in the remaining items (CRCC 2016). Given the fact that television is still the most favored source of news, in particular among older people (Ofcom 2017), who overwhelmingly voted in favor of leaving the European Union (Moore 2016), the role of broadcasting in influencing the debate requires examination. During a standard election campaign, the UK broadcast media are under a regulatory obligation to be impartial and have to keep track of the amount of time accorded to the political parties in rough proportion to their importance. It was the even-​handedness of this approach that ensured television coverage for

 

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Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn in the election of 2017, in spite of his hammering in the mainstream media over the previous two years (Phillips 2019). A referendum campaign is handled differently. The referendum allowed only two choices: Remain or Leave. Two organizations were established to represent these positions. They were allowed to raise money for publicity and received the lion’s share of the media coverage. The broadcasters knew they would be under greater scrutiny than usual. Pro-​Brexit MPs had already attempted to establish a special regulator to ensure the impartiality of the broadcasters, who would have had the right to demand corrections within twenty-​four hours (Sweney 2015). The attempt failed, but an exchange of letters between the chair of the BBC Trust and the secretary of state for media made clear that considerable pressure had been applied behind the scenes in the days before the referendum ( Jackson and Plunkett 2016). The Vote Leave campaign also issued a veiled threat to ITV, warning of “consequences” for what they claimed to be Remain bias (Neilan 2016). The BBC retreated into a position of strategic “balance.” This meant that even ludicrous claims would not be challenged but merely “balanced” by someone from the opposing side, a strategy that arguably encouraged sensational claims to be made in order to capture airtime, social media pickup, and higher audience numbers. On top of this, because the referendum split the Conservative Party, media logics that favor conflict and personalization took precedence over the requirement to inform and educate. The coverage of the campaign was pursued rather in the manner of a sporting event in which the protagonists represented not the broad range of public opinion, let alone the social makeup of the United Kingdom, but instead the two wings of the now embattled Conservative Party. Of a stopwatch count of the top thirty people appearing on television during the referendum period, Conservative politicians accounted for 73 percent, evenly spread between Remain and Leave (CRCC 2016). Nigel Farage of UKIP was the fourth most interviewed person, although he was not a member of the official Leave campaign. Among the top ten sources, the only representatives of Labour, its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and ex-​leader, Gordon Brown, mustered a mere 8.7 percent of the airtime across the whole ten weeks of the campaign (CRCC 2016). The BBC deputy political editor, Norman Smith, was unapologetic about the way the campaign was covered:  “We are there to report what the main combatants in this referendum say, do and argue. The Tory story plays to a bigger narrative about who governs the country after the referendum so there is editorially a pull because of all the question marks about Cameron—​leadership” (Smith 2016). In addition to editorial decisions ensuring that coverage focused almost entirely on the Conservative Party should be added the agenda-​setting role of

 



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the tabloid press. Research by Cushion and colleagues into the 2015 election discovered a clear “agenda-​setting role” for the press: First, almost a third of television news items appeared in newspapers prior to being broadcast by television news. This proportion more than doubled when interpreted by the amount of airtime spent by bulletins covering the same policy stories as newspapers. Second, a clear majority of policy stories reported by broadcasters emanated from right-​wing newspapers. (Cushion et al. 2016, 177) The more highly regulated BBC was less likely to do this than Sky TV, which, according to the research, derived 63.3 percent of stories from newspapers articles. Subsequent research by Justin Schlosberg (2017) confirmed this agenda-​setting role, finding that UK news media were particularly influential. The former research had found that the dominant agenda-​setting newspaper was the Telegraph.

The Themes of the Brexit Campaign Research on subjects covered in the press and in broadcasting found that three major themes dominated coverage across all media:  the conduct of the campaign, the economy, and immigration (CRCC 2016; Moore and Ramsay 2017). While concern about the economy took about the same amount of space/​time across all platforms irrespective of position on the referendum, the issue of immigration attracted 50 percent more attention in the newspapers that campaigned to leave the European Union than it did in those concerned to remain in the European Union. In a significant proportion of articles, the issue of the economy and immigration were linked. According to the research by Loughborough (CRCC 2016), the subject of employment attracted only 3.6 percent of coverage across all media platforms, although the risk of companies leaving the United Kingdom after Brexit, or the removal of EU subsidies, was likely to hit hardest in the de-​industrialized working-​class northern towns where large numbers of people voted to leave. The Kings College research (Moore and Ramsay 2017) dove further into the coverage and found that, although arguments for Remain dominated the headlines in the early weeks of the campaign, with statements about the damage that leaving would do to the economy, the right-​wing press used these claims to attack the government’s credibility, suggesting that the Remainers (or “Remoaners” as they were dubbed) were “desperate” or “hysterical.” The expression “Project Fear” appeared in headlines thirty-​eight times, mostly in the Sun and the Daily

 

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Express. The Daily Express used the expression as a prefix to a number of articles clearly with an eye to its shareability, “PROJECT FEAR: Vote Leave campaign RUBBISHES report claiming NHS will be damaged by Brexit” (Moore and Ramsay 2017). The skillful use of headlines that negatively frame claims by the opposition is a well-​documented tactic for those using social media (Nahon and Hemsley 2014), and the hashtag #projectfear swiftly appeared on Twitter. But researchers also found that Leave messages on Twitter were “more positive, assertive and forward-​looking” (Akitaka and Benoit 2017). Australian researchers refer to the sharing of material in order to create solidarity as “teaming” (Crawford et al. 2015, 122). They found that material of this nature provided almost two-​ thirds of all stories that shared well in their research. The pro-​Leave side was more effective at “teaming” than the Remain side, which used common-​sense and statistics to put their ideas across and lacked the emotional resonance of the pro-​Leave newspapers. This difference is almost certainly why pro-​Remain messages did relatively badly on social media during the campaign (Akitaka and Benoit 2017; Llewellyn and Cram 2015). As the campaign continued, the subject shifted to immigration and the pro-​ Leave side led the agenda. Researchers at Kings counted ninety-​nine front-​page leads on this subject, of which 76 percent were in just four Leave-​supporting newspapers (Moore and Ramsay 2017). The Express, Daily Mail, and Sun produced 1,785 articles about immigration over the ten weeks of the campaign. The subject of migrants putting pressure on public services and reducing pay for British workers was particularly prominent in the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, where it was also the subject of leader and comment columns. The pro-​Leave newspapers featured statements about immigration from pro-​ Leave politicians, but they also led the news agenda by sourcing their own stories and using them to attack the government. The Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph both featured front-​page leads about EU nationals convicted of crimes. The Kings’ researchers (Moore and Ramsay 2017, 73)  found that a large number of these articles were misleading or partial in their use of statistics or information, but they were topped by just the kind of headline that would travel well in social media, such as “EU KILLERS AND RAPISTS WE’VE FAILED TO DEPORT:  Thousands of violent thugs and rapists from the EU are walking Britain’s streets and clogging up our jails because the Government has failed to send them home” (Drury and Slack 2016). The number of immigration stories doubled from 10 to 20 percent of all stories in week four (CRCC 2016). The broadcasters, taking their cue from the numerically dominant right-​wing (pro-​Leave) press, devoted an even higher proportion of stories to immigration than did the pro-​Leave newspapers. It is the coverage of immigration that most clearly demonstrates the failure of the

 



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BBC and the broadcasters to establish their own agenda rather than relying on the agenda setting of the press with its built-​in pro-​Leave bias. The broadcasters’ reliance on Conservative spokespeople defined the way in which the subject of immigration was framed. Of the top five most prominent voices in the campaign, all were men, all went to private schools, and four went to Oxford University. Four were members of the Conservative Party and the fifth, Nigel Farage, was a stockbroker and the founder of the UKIP, a party that has campaigned tirelessly for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. Given the composition of the elite who were shaping the story, it is not really surprising that employment issues barely registered (the broadcasters provided exactly the same proportion of coverage as did the pro-​Leave press). No airtime was provided on the issue of the environment, although environmental protection became a major concern the year after the vote, and the possibility of rising prices did not figure at all (CRCC 2016; Moore and Ramsay 2017).

Discussion The European referendum campaign demonstrated that, when the BBC is intimidated, it tends to retreat into a position of “strategic balance,” which, combined with the adoption of commercial media logics relating to competition and personalization, takes precedence over the role of information provider. Under the normal rules of impartiality, the BBC would have been forced to offer the same time to the key members of the major political parties. The interpretation of the rules around the referendum meant that the usual concept of impartiality was set aside in favor of balance, which allowed the public broadcaster to deem the opposing wings of the Conservative Party the key players (BBC 2016). This ensured that the polls of the debate were fixed within the limits set by the Conservative elite. Those representing organized labor hardly figured in the debate. Added to this was the clear agenda-​setting role of the right-​wing, pro-​Leave press and the dominance of the Leave message on social media (Llewellyn and Cram 2015). This firmly constructed Europe, city dwellers, and in particular European citizens working in the United Kingdom as the source of all the ills of globalization:  low wages, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and even, in a much-​tweeted article in the Daily Express, a threat to the future existence of the National Health Service (Waterson 2017). This image of the debate was then amplified on television, accompanied by apocalyptic warnings about the likely impact of Brexit on the future of the city of London and large globalized companies.

 

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Just as Trump offered a positive message of national renewal to those people who had suffered from the impact of globalization, the Leave campaign promised to “take back control” from the European Union, appealing to nostalgia for a time when Britain ruled much of the world, Churchill won the war, and beer was served warm by English barmaids. The major countering message offered by the leaders of the Conservative pro-​Remain camp was that Europe threatened house prices and the city of London. For working-​class voters, in the de-​industrialized north, it is not hard to see how a vote for Remain could be interpreted as a vote in favor of the banks and the Conservative Party, whereas a vote for Leave would be one in the eye to those posh boys in the city. The broadcasters then relayed this debate rather than intervening or changing the terms of the discussion. This meant that those looking for explanations, or reassurance, from their most trusted news providers tended to see a reflection of the debate in the newspapers, alongside a commentary on the ups and downs of the campaign, rather than an examination of the impact of change on the lives of ordinary people. It was Conservative voters who made up the bulk of the Leave vote; however, many of the “don’t knows” and “won’t votes” living in Labour voting areas defied the pollsters and cast their ballots against the status quo, thus delivering a stunning blow to the British establishment. In the aftermath, some of those media commentators, who backed remaining in the European Union, have looked for outside influences to blame (Cadwalladr 2017), but the evidence points toward home. The bulk of those who voted to leave were older people who are more likely to read newspapers and watch television (Ofcom 2017) than to find news online. If they were using social media, it is likely that messages from the right-​wing tabloids and the Leave campaigns were being passed their way by the most politically active members of their own social circles (Kalogeropoulos et  al. 2017). Those people engaging with the numerically dominant right-​wing press found that the themes they were reading about were reinforced on television news. Television gave equal time to Remain voices, but the right-​wing tabloids would use this as an opportunity to attack and ridicule the “Remoaners.” Ridicule is a powerful method of team building that encourages audiences to dismiss all opposition voices as unpatriotic or inauthentic. The dominance of Leave on social media and the timidity of the BBC in rebutting even clearly inaccurate statements by the Leave side provided a reinforcing cycle that could not easily be countered. In a polarizing news landscape, the role of “trust anchors” is vital and needs protection. The BBC, under attack from pro-​Brexit MPs and the right-​wing press, took fright. The policy of strategic balance shielded them from political attack, but it also undermined public trust (Newman et al. 2017), which the broadcaster has yet to win back.

 



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Russian bots and Ukrainian fake news organizations are no competition for newspapers that brazenly invent stories and exploit any whiff of scandal to increase sales. British people know this, and the UK mass market press is the least trusted in Europe (EBU Media Intelligence Service 2016). However, commercial newspapers are as responsive to market pressures as they are to the whims of politically partisan editors and proprietors. Younger voters are overwhelmingly pro-​European, and the recent retirement of the powerful editor of the Daily Mail, before Brexit has actually been fully attained, will provide a useful opportunity for further research into the role of the right-​wing press in the United Kingdom. While the news media have an important role in a democracy, audiences are not passive recipients of messages, however well tailored to engage or alarm. British media watchers will be watching with interest as the United Kingdom’s currently most influential newspapers decide where they will stand. The gradual loss of trust in the BBC is a matter of greater concern. Recent changes in the corporation’s structure are likely to make the organization warier of criticism rather than more robustly independent (Media Reform Coalition 2018). The BBC is still the only media organization that is capable of crossing the divides of polarized online media, and the evidence of its role in the European referendum campaign suggests that much more needs to be done both internally and externally to shore up and guarantee its future independence if it is to continue to operate as a “trust anchor” for the British public.

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Hutchens, Myiah J., Jay D. Hmielowski, Bruce E. Pinkleton, and Michael A. Beam. 2016. “A Spiral of Skepticism? The Relationship Between Citizens’ Involvement with Campaign Information to Their Skepticism and Political Knowledge.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 93 (4): 1073–​1090. Ipsos MORI. 2016. “European Union Membership—​Trends.” Ipsos MORI Game Changers, June 15. https://​www.ipsos.com/​ipsos-​mori/​en-​uk/​european-​union-​membership-​trends. Iyengar, Shanto, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes. 2012. “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization.” Public Opinion Quarterly 76 (3): 405–​431. Iyengar, Shanto, and Sean J. Westwood. 2015. “Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines:  New Evidence on Group Polarization.” American Journal of Political Science 59: 690–​707. Jackson, Jasper, and John Plunkett. 2016. “John Whittingdale Is ‘Bullying’ BBC over Europe, Says Shadow Culture Secretary.” The Guardian, April 19. https://​www.theguardian.com/​media/​ 2016/​apr/​19/​john-​whittingdale-​bbc-​europe-​maria-​eagle. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, and Joseph N. Cappella. 2008. Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. New York: Oxford University Press. Kalogeropoulos, Antonis, Samuel Negredo, Ike Picone, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. 2017. “Who Shares and Comments on News? A  Cross-​National Comparative Analysis of Online and Social Media Participation.” Social Media + Society 3 (4): 1–​12. Llewellyn, Clare, and Laura Cram. 2015. “EU Referendum Campaign Groups:  Strategies on Twitter.” European Futures, November 27. http://​www.europeanfutures.ed.ac.uk/​ article-​2212. Martin, Kingsley. 1934. “Public Opinion:  Fascism and the ‘Daily Mail.’” Political Quarterly 5: 273–​276. Media Intelligence Service. 2016. “Trust in Media 2016.” European Broadcasting Union (EBU), March. https://​www.ebu.ch/​files/​live/​sites/​ebu/​files/​Publications/​EBU-​IS/​. Media Reform Coalition. 2018. “MRC Publishes Proposals for the Radical Reform of the BBC.” March 15. http://​www.mediareform.org.uk/​blog/​mrc-​publishes-​proposals-​radical-​reform-​bbc. Moore, Martin, and Gordon Ramsay. 2017. “UK Media Coverage of the 2016 EU Referendum Campaign.” London:  Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power, Kings College. Moore, Peter. 2016. “How Britain Voted: Over-​65s Were More Than Twice as Likely as Under-​25s to Have Voted to Leave the European Union.” YouGov UK, June 27. https://​yougov.co.uk/​ news/​2016/​06/​27/​how-​britain-​voted/​. Nahon, Karine, and Jeff Hemsley. 2014. “Homophily in the Guise of Cross-​Linking:  Political Blogs and Content.” American Behavioral Scientist, 58 (10): 1294–​1313. Narayanan, Vidya, Philip N. Howard, Bence Kollanyi, and Mona Elswah. 2017. “Russian Involvement and Junk News During Brexit.” COMPROP Data Memo 2017.10, December 19. http://​comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/​w p-​content/​uploads/​sites/​89/​2017/​12/​Russia-​and-​Brexit-​ v27.pdf. Neilan, Catherine. 2016. “EU Referendum:  Vote Leave Issues Veiled Threat to ITV over Brexit Debates.” City A.M., May 12. http://​www.cityam.com/​240928/​ eu-​referendum-​vote-​leave-​issues-​veiled-​threat-​to-​itv-​over-​brexit-​debates. Newman, Nic, Richard Fletcher, Antonis Kalogeropoulos, David A. L. Levy, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. 2017. “Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017.” Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University. http://​www.digitalnewsreport.org/​survey/​ 2017/​united-​kingdom-​2017/​. Newman, Nic, David A. L. Levy, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. 2015. “Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2015.” Oxford:  Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University. http://​www.digitalnewsreport.org/​survey/​2015/​sources-​of-​news-​2015/​. Ofcom. 2017. “News Consumption in the UK: 2016.” Ofcom, June 29. https://​www.ofcom.org. uk/​_​_​data/​assets/​pdf_​file/​0016/​103570/​news-​consumption-​uk-​2016.pdf. Pariser, Eli. 2011. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. London: Penguin.

 

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Cultivating Distrust of the Mainstream Media Propagandists for a Liberal Machine and the American Establishment Julie B. L ane

Distrust of or disdain for the US news media is not a twenty-​first-​century invention. Polls show an increase in Americans’ perceptions of media bias over recent decades ( Jones and Ritter 2018). Although individuals who identify with each major political party report doubts about the fairness of the media, this attitude consistently is more prominent among those who categorize themselves as Republican or conservative (Swift 2017; Barthel and Mitchell 2017; DiMaggio, this volume), the result of a decades-​long effort on the part of conservative media, politicians, and activists. During the mid-​1950s and early 1960s, National Review, the foremost conservative journal of the day, cultivated doubts about the fairness of the mainstream media and argued that these media served as propagandists for a liberal power structure intent on maintaining its control. In this role, the journal argued, the media disseminated liberal orthodoxy and helped to deepen the imperceptible yet pervasive influence of what the journal branded the American Establishment. The notion that there was consensus support for this liberal worldview was not the product of chance, National Review implied, but of the media’s purposeful exclusion of expressions of dissent. The journal’s efforts helped to position conservatives as outsiders and to turn conservatives away from the mainstream media toward National Review and like-​minded outlets, and paved the way for the development of the conservative mediasphere that has grown into a major force in the American political culture of the twenty-​first century.

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Birth of the Conservative Movement National Review, founded in 1955, played a pivotal role in the success of the modern conservative movement in the United States, but the movement’s roots extend to the early twentieth century. Scholars have noted similarities between the postwar movement and, for example, resistance to labor unions and support for the New York Stock Exchange in the opening years of the century, the first Red Scare and the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, and populist opposition to the New Deal and other forms of liberalism in the 1930s. They also have described how conservatives influenced federal law enforcement and financial investment policy from within the government during the 1930s (Phillips-​Fein 2011). Following World War II, an intellectual struggle ensued over what American conservatism embodied. Traditionalists viewed the political chaos of the early twentieth century, represented most vividly by the recent world wars, as the inevitable outcome of centuries of Enlightenment thought that rejected a universal truth (Nash 1976; Lee 2014). Libertarians, who believed that the goal of government was to ensure individual liberty, renewed their attacks on the social welfare state that continued to grow (Nash 1976; Lee 2014). The emergence of the Soviet Union as the nation’s primary adversary and communist advances overseas re-​energized fears of communist infiltration of domestic institutions and led many on the right to place the battle against communism front and center (and also prompted many intellectuals to abandon the Left) (Nash 1976; Lee 2014). These ideological debates took place in a variety of venues, and by the mid-​ 1950s the contours of a “conservative counter-​sphere” had become perceptible (Major 2012, 459; see also Major, this volume). Human Events, a weekly newsletter founded in 1944, emerged from the anti-​interventionist America First Committee and was perhaps the most influential conservative periodical of the time, although it limited itself to libertarianism and did not aggressively attempt to grow its circulation (Nash 1976; Hemmer 2016). Among its competitors, the Freeman struggled to gain readers during its brief existence as a conservative journal from 1950 to 1952, and American Mercury consigned itself to the sidelines when it turned to anti-​Semitism in 1952 (Nash 1976; Hemmer 2016). Intellectuals also set out their arguments in books that served as “debate handbooks” and would feed conservatives for generations. These included The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek (1944), Witness by Whittaker Chambers (1952), Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver (1948), God and Man at Yale by William Buckley Jr. (1951), The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk (1953), and The Quest for Community by Robert Nisbet (1953) (Lee 2014, 16). Although print publications dominated the landscape, Clarence Manion pioneered

 



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conservative talk radio when he launched his weekly Manion Forum of Opinion radio program in 1954 (Perlstein [2001] 2009; Hemmer 2016). What was missing from this landscape, William Buckley Jr. believed, was a journal that allowed conservatives to inject their ideas into political debates both regularly and without delay, and he seized the opportunity to create such a vehicle. In a draft of his “Selling Memo,” likely written in 1954 or 1955 (Buckley n.d.), he proposed a “fighting weekly journal” that would “coordinate and summarize the best-​informed conservative argument in the midst of any timely controversy” to counter what he judged the “monopoly on sophisticated information” enjoyed by liberals. The result was National Review, launched in the fall of 1955. Buckley invited intellectuals representing varying strains of conservative thought, including traditionalists, libertarians, and anti-​communists, to engage in their battle of ideas between the journal’s covers. James Burnham, John Chamberlain, Whittaker Chambers, Willmoore Kendall, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, William Schlamm, and Freda Utley were only a few of the individuals who contributed to National Review during its early days. Buckley hoped that the journal would “not only become a habit, but . . . a narcotic,” as he wrote Clinton Davidson on December 23, 1954 (Buckley 1954), and it became indispensable to the conservative movement during the postwar decades. Its success in fashioning a common ideological frame was so critical that the historian George Nash (1976) remarked, “If National Review (or something like it) had not been founded, there would probably have been no cohesive intellectual force on the Right in the 1960s and 1970s” (153). Buckley designed National Review to reach opinion leaders rather than grassroots activists (Nash 1976; Farber 2010), but the journal, along with other conservative media outlets and activist organizations, helped discontented Americans in cities and towns across the nation begin to see themselves as part of something bigger. In this regard, it built on the short-​lived efforts of Facts Forum, whose magazine, radio and television programs, and local discussion groups helped stoke nascent conservative sentiments among the grassroots in the early 1950s (Bauer 2018). Describing the state of grassroots activism in the mid-​1950s as “anarchy” (Viguerie and Franke 2004, 49) might have overstated the situation, but it is true that there was not yet a recognizable conservative movement. The most visible and aggressive activists at the time were those who belonged to the anti-​communist John Birch Society, concentrated in California and Texas. Not until the beginning of the 1960s would the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) form—​with an assist from Buckley and the conservative strategist William Rusher, by then the publisher of National Review—​and begin to organize students on US college campuses, or would activists like the “suburban warriors” of Orange County, California, begin to make their presence felt (McGirr 2001). Throughout the 1950s, however, conservative media helped

 

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such people realize that they were not alone in their concerns about the sea change in American society or their fears of communism, often prompting these “grumblers” (Viguerie and Franke 2004, 54) to turn to activism. Conservative media not only brought people and ideas together but also identified what it meant to be an American conservative in the mid-​twentieth century. National Review, in particular, helped fashion what Susan Currie Sivek (2008) called “a symbolic collective identity” (256) for conservatives by providing them with a common frame of reference. The journal helped grassroots conservatives connect their experiences and opinions with ideological frames supplied by intellectuals and recognize the values they shared with individuals drawn to conservatism for different reasons. This identity was built around Christianity, anti-​communism, and libertarianism, as well as the demonization of liberalism (Sivek 2008; McGirr 2001). As defined by National Review, it did not include views too far to the right. The journal worked to stake out and enforce the confines of what it considered a radical yet respectable conservatism, eventually banning contributors such as Peter Viereck and Clinton Rossiter, who it judged too willing to compromise with liberalism, and Ayn Rand, whose objectivist philosophy affronted many at the journal (Nash 1976; Viguerie and Franke 2004; Sivek 2008). It also addressed anti-​communism using what Sivek (2008) described as “fact-​based argument and reasonable tone” (254) to distinguish itself from what it deemed the extremism of John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, whom the journal would expel from its pages in 1962. Conservative media outlets also encouraged their audiences to apply this worldview to their consideration of all issues (Sivek 2008). This included their interactions with mainstream media.

Extending the Liberal Media Bias Critique Although charges of liberal media bias took on more prominence during the 1950s, critics on the right had leveled such accusations since the interwar years. Headlines, and What’s Behind Them, created in 1938, submitted that journalists’ communist sympathies led them to suppress information about communist influence within unions and New Deal agencies, and other publications followed in a similar vein (Bauer 2018). Beginning in the late 1940s, the anti-​communist organization American Business Consultants used its Counterattack newsletter to criticize the failure of mainstream news sources to adequately cover the communist conspiracy it believed was taking place, and during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, the organization issued Red Channels, which served as a blacklist for the television and film industries and reported on supposed infiltration of media by these communist sympathizers who slanted news (Bauer 2018). Plain

 



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Talk, started in 1946, worked to expose the putative Communist Party ties of the progressive press critic George Seldes (Bauer 2018). Other outlets approached media bias from other angles. Human Events and the Manion Opinion Forum both were founded on the belief that conservative views generally were unwelcome in the bulk of the nation’s press (Major 2012; Hemmer 2016). National Review expanded this media critique and embedded it even more deeply in the conservative identity. The journal accomplished this in three interrelated ways between 1955 and 1958. It set up liberalism as the enemy of all conservatives; it claimed that individual media outlets did not simply tilt to the left on some issues but worked together to demand conformity with the entire liberal agenda; and it declared that the media belonged to a smug, elite liberal Establishment. In doing so, National Review provided a framework its readers could use to make sense of what they encountered in the mainstream media. Although it took time to clarify what conservatism stood for, National Review made it clear from the beginning what conservatives opposed. As the historian George Nash (1976) noted, “Above all, National Review in its first years was dominated by the conviction that its preeminent intellectual enemy—​and they insisted that it was an enemy—​was liberalism” (149). An editorial statement in the first issue declared “that there is a Liberal point of view on national and world affairs” made up of “a distinctly Liberal way of looking at and grasping political reality . . . and a distinctly Liberal set of values and goals” (National Review 1955a). National Review judged this point of view fundamentally flawed and catalogued its flaws in a statement by Buckley and an explanation of the journal’s credenda. Liberals’ belief in the perfectibility of humankind led them to reject “fixed postulates” in favor of “radical social experimentation” driven by their embrace of pragmatism and relativism (Buckley 1955). Privately, Buckley used even stronger language, accusing liberals of “go[ing] a-​whoring . . . after illusory and flimsy and transient truths” in a letter to Selma Levenberg on December 3, 1957 (Buckley Papers, correspondence [B-​Z]). This way of looking at the world, National Review argued, produced policies sold as centrist or bipartisan that sacrificed the nation’s principles and independence. Liberals accepted coexistence with international communism, a position National Review declared “neither desirable nor possible, nor honorable”; agreed to cede control of foreign policy to the United Nations and other instruments of “world government”; and, under the influence of unions that “identified themselves with doctrinaire socialist objectives,” rejected the free market (National Review 1955b). When taking over as publisher in 1957, William Rusher accused liberals of having “no remedy to propose against the steady advance of Communist dogma . . . for the very good reason that [they shared] Communism’s materialist premises” (Rusher 1957). This enemy presented not simply a philosophical challenge to conservatism but a practical one as well, National Review asserted, as it functioned as a

 

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machine that indoctrinated the public with its way of thinking and excluded serious expressions of intellectual and grassroots dissent from the liberal worldview. Liberals “run just about everything,” Buckley declared in his “Publisher’s Statement” that introduced the journal to the world (Buckley 1955). Doing so allowed them to engender conformity with their way of thinking, he said, making the point using his trademark wit: There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals’. Drop a little itching powder in Jimmy Wechsler’s bath and before he has scratched himself for the third time, Arthur Schlesinger will have denounced you in a dozen books and speeches, Archibald MacLeish will have written ten heroic cantos about our age of terror, Harper’s will have published them, and everyone in sight will have been nominated for a Freedom Award. (Buckley 1955) Brave conservatives who refused to conform were “suppressed and mutilated by the Liberals,” he said (Buckley 1955). Such conformity did not come about by accident, Buckley claimed. He explained that it was enforced by “the Liberal Machine” made up of institutions “at the ideological core of contemporary Liberalism,” including Americans for Democratic Action, the Democratic National Committee, and major Washington and New York newspapers, among others (Buckley 1956a). This “politico-​ideological caste . . . control the major part of the ‘communications’ of this country and a major share in this country’s rule,” he said, and individuals associated with these institutions “know each other intimately, confide in each other, collaborate actively, give mutual support and assistance” (Buckley 1956a). Given the power they commanded, liberals had no need to hide their plan “to retain control of the intellectual community, and thereby the media of mass thought and mass communication, and to utterly destroy all who oppose them,” argued Ralph de Toledano (1956). The media made up a critical component of this alleged machine, and the emergence of a national media system and its promise of objective news coverage aided National Review’s ability to paint them as a single machine-​like entity. As the historian David Greenberg (2008) argues, by the mid-​1950s it was possible to identify a “mainstream media”—​“a set of relatively like-​minded national institutions” (170) that shared an approach to news coverage. Furthermore, institutions such as the New  York Times, Time, Newsweek, and the networks claimed to offer impartial coverage (Greenberg 2008). This allowed National Review to demonstrate supposed bias on the part of the media by criticizing a particular institution or journalist or by making sweeping charges against the entire industry. The journal aimed the bulk of its criticism at major newspapers and magazines and columnists based in the intellectual and political hubs of

 



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New York and Washington, especially the Times and the Washington Post, and columnists Walter Lippmann, Joseph Alsop, and Stewart Alsop, but it made it clear that this machine encompassed regional newspapers and the networks as well. Upfront about the conservative perspective it provided, National Review had no qualms with judging news institutions that purported to offer objective coverage, but it also included activist or opinion journals such as the Reporter and the New Republic in this machine, disingenuously bolstering its charges of liberal bias against all media. “The Printed Word,” one of two columns dedicated to exposing how the media served this machine, typically dissected a single newspaper or journal at a time. Authorship of the column changed hands twice within the first few months and ultimately ended up in the hands of Willmoore Kendall, a highly argumentative political theorist who had served as Buckley’s mentor at Yale. Designed to chronicle “the delinquencies of the Liberal press,” it explained in detail how the publication in question over the course of a particular week defended liberal policies or institutions (National Review 1955c). An analysis of the Atlanta Constitution, for example, claimed that the newspaper betrayed its biases by downplaying a congressional investigation into alleged communist infiltration of the New York Times while highlighting the New York Daily News’ negligible connection to the matter. “The News, of course, has a conservative reputation,” the column noted (Mitchell 1956a). The column also mocked the Hartford Courant’s concern about the inroads being made by an emboldened Soviet Union, writing, “Luckily the Courant has a formula for success. We should stop asking annoying questions before we shovel out foreign aid” (Mitchell 1956b). As for the New  York Times, the column accused its book review section of “plug[ging] the books it finds congenial and kill[ing] off . . . books that are inconvenient to the Times’ anti-​anti-​Communist, pro-​Liberal-​Welfare-​State, pro-​Zionist, pro-​egalitarianism position” (Kendall 1957b). “The Liberal Line” more explicitly made the case that the media worked deliberately and cooperatively to facilitate liberals’ political aims. An editorial statement in the first issue declared that “the nation’s leading opinion-​makers for the most part share the Liberal point of view, try indefatigably to inculcate it in their readers’ minds, and to that end employ the techniques of propaganda” (National Review 1955a), and “The Liberal Line” consistently argued that the media made up a “Liberal propaganda machine” that promoted this point of view. Kendall, a devoted conservative whose resolute anti-​communism spurred him, like many others, to move to the right after World War II, embraced neither the libertarian nor traditionalist philosophies. His commitment was to self-​government and majority rule, and his columns reflected the value he placed on deliberative, democratic decision making—​and what he saw as liberals’ neglect of such principles (Nash 1976; Nash 2002, 8–​11). “The Liberal Line,” said the one-​time

 

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National Review editor Jeffrey Hart (2005), “rested on the comic assumption that liberals, like Communists, were a conscious, centrally directed conspiracy” (31). Neither Kendall nor his colleagues actually believed that to be the case, Hart said, but the idea allowed him to expose the “high degree of uniformity in liberal opinion, often extending to details” (31). Rather than deliberate issues or explore the consequences of policies, Kendall argued, the “liberal propaganda machine” hammered away at its chosen positions. At times the column explained what line this machine was pushing on a particular issue at a particular moment. For example, “July 1956 was Let’s-​Remind-​Ourselves-​of-​Latin-​America month for the Liberal propaganda machine,” Kendall said. “The machine did not, to be sure, work at it very hard,” but “it made space available in the Reporter and in the New York Times Magazine for two articles on why we have got to do something about Latin America” (Kendall 1956d). In November of that year, “thanks to the industry and foresight of the Reporter . . ., it is easy to predict the major themes of the new line” on desegregation, the issue the “Liberal propaganda machine” had “chosen for its definitive battle with the white Southerners,” he said (Kendall 1956e). There also developed a “liberal line” on “the ideal contemporary American ambassador,” he said. Such a person “represents not the nation that accredits him, but the nation to which he is accredited,” and understanding that “render[ed] comprehensible the particular kind of furor the Liberal propaganda machine, spearheaded as usual by the Washington bureau of the New York Times, has kicked up over” a particular appointment (Kendall 1957c). In addition, because “the Liberal propaganda machine has no principles except that which looks to the relief or prevention of ‘suffering’ on the part of persons or groups as it, at the moment, happens to ‘identify’ with,” Kendall said, rather than re-​examining the consequences of policies it supported or considering alternative views, it sometimes found itself “defending a position clearly at variance with [its] principles, real or avowed” (Kendall 1957a). This machine also relied on various techniques to create an environment in which it always was right, according to Kendall. It “was never wrong about anything in the past,” he said, and “it will stand ready to prove tomorrow that it hasn’t been wrong about anything today” (Kendall 1956b). One practice in which it engaged to do so, he said, was “wheel-​spinning.” As he explained: Such an operation is needed when the machine finds itself up against a great event whose consequences are still uncertain . . ., or when the themes it yearns to plug away at might subsequently lay it open to the unbearable charge that it has been wrong about something, or misread the course of events. (Kendall 1955)

 



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At other times, he said, liberals “play[ed] possum,” which involved “keeping conspicuously quiet about their opposition to” efforts they disliked by using the machine to “de-​emphasize the doctrinal aspect of its commentaries and editorials; to make the most of its control of the news columns; and to present the appearance of objective news reporting” (Kendall 1956c). The machine also guarded against allowing alternative points of view from gaining sway by marginalizing such views, he said. By employing such techniques, Kendall implied that what the machine portrayed as fact or majority opinion was in reality the product of a coordinated effort to manipulate public opinion. Aside from these columns, National Review editors and contributors did not go out of their way to convince readers of the media’s liberal bias but simply acted as if such bias was an established fact. This was especially true when the topic was communism. Echoing other conservative critics, National Review asserted that the media harbored sympathy for communists or had no stomach for the fight against communism. It labeled Walter Lippmann a defeatist for acknowledging the Soviet Union’s strengths (Chamberlain 1958); decried the dearth of calls for US action against the Soviet Union following its violent crackdown in Hungary in 1956 (National Review 1956); charged the Times with presenting “the most able of living Communist leaders,” Mao Tse-​tung, “as a prophet of sweetness and light (Meyer 1957); suggested that broadcaster Edward Murrow believed that “a Communist is okay, so long as he operates only in the U.S.” (Farr 1956); and chided journalists for berating leaders of the battle against communist infiltration of the US government (Buckley 1956b; National Review 1957c) and for shrugging their shoulders at the notion of communists in newsrooms (Buckley 1956b).

The American Establishment National Review took its media critique a step further by characterizing the media as smug and elitist, part of what it called the American Establishment. The idea that liberals were arrogant and assumed that their way of thinking should and did dominate the intellectual and political cultures was a core assumption on which National Review was founded. Buckley called out “the marked smugness among the Liberals  .  .  .  born of their conviction that they have met and vanquished the opposition once and for all,” when pitching the journal to Clinton Davidson in a December 23, 1954, letter (Buckley 1954), and Kendall based “The Liberal Line” column on the idea that “the Liberal intellectuals . . . possess a moral and intellectual smugness the like of which the world has never before seen” (Kendall 1956a). Led by Frank Meyer, however, beginning in 1956,

 

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National Review encapsulated this critique by developing the concept of the Establishment. Modern use of the term “the Establishment” originated in England, where journalist Henry Fairlie claimed credit for introducing it in a 1955 piece for the Spectator. The term had been associated with the Church of England, the established, or state, church (Fairlie 1968; British Broadcasting Corporation 2011), but Fairlie applied it more broadly to include not only the church or even the secular political structure but also social and cultural leaders. “By the ‘Establishment,’ ” he wrote, “I do not mean only the centres of official power—​though they are certainly part of it—​but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised” (Fairlie 1955, 380). Although such power was evident “in the activities of, not only the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Earl Marshal, but of such lesser mortals as the chairman of the Arts Council, the Director-​General of the BBC, and even the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, not to mention divinities like Lady Violet Bonham Carter,” it was not an organization with definable membership qualifications (380). Such individuals influenced the direction of events not by leveraging the power of their titles or positions, but by relying on the “subtle social relationships” they maintained with each other (381). The American Establishment, as Meyer, a National Review editor, began talking about it, combined the conformity and control of “the Liberal Machine” with the amorphous nature of the British version. It was “not a conspiracy, not an organized and disciplined body, but men so inspired by so essential a unity of belief on fundamental matters that consultation, organization, detailed agreement, is unnecessary” (Meyer 1958). This Establishment may have lacked aristocratic members, but the term’s British origins imbued it with a sense of elitism. Buckley (1962) later described the American Establishment as being “of the class that governs the governors” and said it sought “to set the bounds of permissible opinions.” Whereas “machine” denoted deliberate coordination among its constituent parts, the Establishment, as Meyer employed the term, represented a way of thinking so deeply ingrained in the political culture that it negated a need for collaboration among those who composed it, making it an insidious and, thus, more formidable opponent. It existed apart from or above individuals and institutions vested with legal authority or accorded intellectual or cultural status. The Establishment’s power resided not in any actual institutions, yet its influence was institutionalized. John Dewey, for example, might have inspired Establishment thinking, and Adlai Stevenson might have represented the mid-​1950s Establishment, but the Establishment did not depend on either specific individual for its power and would outlast the public careers of both (Meyer 1958).

 



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Meyer did not explicitly link the media to the Establishment, but their membership was implied, and on rare occasions others noted the relationship of individual journalists and news organizations to the Establishment. The New York Times and the Washington Post, for example, were “the heavy artillery of the Establishment” (National Review 1957d), and Walter Lippmann, Joseph Alsop, Stewart Alsop, Roscoe Drummond, Marquis Childs, Time, and Life made up its “heavy reserves” (National Review 1957a). Although acceptance into the Establishment did not depend on whether an individual held a particular title or position, it did require strict conformity with liberal orthodoxy, according to National Review. “Differences do exist” among its members, Meyer said, “but underlying these differences, a broadly consistent and delimitable body of dogma pervades the consciousness and shapes the actions of the decisive and articulate sections of our society,” and that dogma reflected the fundamental critiques conservative intellectuals made of liberalism (Meyer 1958). “Philosophically, this body of dogma is relativist, pragmatic, positivist, scornful of absolute criteria, of all strictly theoretical thought, of all inquiry not amenable to the methods of the natural sciences,” Meyer wrote. “Socially, it assumes the existence of an organism, ‘society,’ as the being to which, and to the good of which, all moral (and by the same token, political) problems finally refer,” and it concerned itself with “collectivist images of specialized groups” while neglecting individual people. “Politically, it attributes virtues in strict proportionality to power. Actions are best, and best performed, when the state performs them,” and the bigger the government the better. “Economically, it takes for granted that the several energies of men expressed through the functioning of a free market economy can lead only to disaster,” and “it demands that the statist section in a ‘mixed economy’ control all the decisive sectors of the economy and receive a lion’s share, through taxation, of the product.” Finally, he said, “Emotionally, it prefers psychoanalysis to the dark night of the soul, ‘adjustment’ to achievement, security to freedom. It preaches ‘the end of ideology,’ admires experts and fears prophets, fears above all commitment to value transcending the fact.” Meyer employed the Establishment as a conservative call to action. “It is necessary to recognize that there is an Establishment and to discern its lineaments clearly,” he wrote. “For only if it is seen to exist and seen for what it is, is it possible to fight to unseat it.”

Conclusion References to the Establishment in the pages of National Review declined after 1958, as did explicit discussion of liberal media bias, but both ideas made lasting impressions. In the face of financial difficulties, the journal switched from

 

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a weekly to a biweekly publication schedule, and the columns dedicated to a sustained analysis of the media were discontinued after Kendall took on a series of faculty positions beginning in 1958. Meyer continued his interrogation of liberalism and all that the Establishment implied but rarely invoked that term. Yet, just as National Review had built on critiques formed before it came into existence, other critics picked up and amplified its ideas. The idea of the Establishment initially gained greater exposure through an unlikely source, a political writer with whom Buckley often tangled. In a May 1962 essay published in Esquire magazine, Richard Rovere wrote, “It is now, of course, conceded by most fair-​minded and objective authorities that there is an Establishment in America—​a more or less closed and self-​sustaining institution that holds a preponderance of power in our more or less open society.” Poking fun at National Review, he described the Establishment’s influence as “pervasive,” but said “William F. Buckley, Jr. and his collaborators on the National Review” included “just about everyone in the country except themselves, and the great, hidden, enlightened majority of voters who would, if only they were given the chance, put a non-​Establishment man in the White House” (Rovere 1962a). Although Rovere called the piece “a hoax” in a May 16, 1962, letter to Mr. Gass (Rovere 1962b), it set off a serious exchange between the author and Buckley in which Rovere questioned the true intent behind National Review’s critique of the Establishment and Buckley reinforced his charge of liberal elitism. Buckley’s response to the essay reproached liberal intellectuals for treating anyone who did not share their views as part of “an ignorant minority” and not concerning themselves with the opinions of such individuals (Buckley 1962). “For in this country there are two consensuses,” Buckley wrote, “that of the people (broadly speaking) and that of the intellectuals (narrowly speaking).” Rovere answered that Buckley needed to deny his qualifications as an intellectual so that he could play “the oppositionist” and establish a presumably artificial “identification with the masses” (Rovere 1962c). Following this exchange, “the word [Establishment] . . . took off,” said John Chamberlain, a National Review editor, in an August 21, 1964, column, “and, at the San Francisco [Republican] convention [in  1964] one heard all about ‘The Liberal Establishment’ or the ‘Eastern International Establishment’ from people who had never heard of [Frank] Meyer or Rovere” (Chamberlain 1964). That San Francisco convention culminated in the nomination of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, whose supporters invoked the idea of the Establishment as well as claims of liberal media bias. Conservatives had long awaited the chance to reclaim the Republican Party, and the possibility that Goldwater could capture the nomination energized the popular movement. Rusher, one of the forces behind the senator’s candidacy, noted that “the conservative movement found Senator Goldwater, Senator Goldwater found the movement; it

 



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was like the meeting of the Blue and the White Nile” (Ludwig 1964). Yet, as recounted by Theodore White (1965) in his chronicle of the 1964 campaign, Goldwater’s nomination was unthinkable to the business, finance, and media leaders and foreign relations experts centered in New York who made up “the Eastern Establishment,” and they committed themselves to finding a candidate who could keep him off the party’s ticket. Activist Phyllis Schlafly (1964), signaling the party’s move to the right by expanding the Establishment to include moderate Republicans, described these leaders as “a small group of secret kingmakers” who since 1936 had “manipulated the Republican National Convention to nominate candidates” (25–​26) to their liking. Furthermore, Goldwater’s supporters charged the media with working to deny the senator a victory. The media sought to ensure that the party nominated candidates “who will not bring into question the assumptions on which the Establishment is built,” National Review (1964) said, and former president Dwight Eisenhower directed delegates to “scorn the divisive efforts of those outside our family, including sensation-​ seeking columnists and commentators because . . . these are people who couldn’t care less about the good of our party” (Lewis 1964). Human Events increased its efforts to expose such bias as well (Major 2012). The candidate himself also joined in, charging the New York Times, for example, with “stoop[ing] to utter dishonesty in reflecting my views” and the San Francisco Chronicle with reporting “out-​and-​out lies,” and describing a CBS report as “nothing but . . . a dad-​ burned dirty lie,” part of the network’s “policy of constant harassment” (United Press International 1964). Alabama governor George Wallace, who sought the Democratic nomination that same year, also accused the media of liberal bias. David Greenberg (2008) credited Wallace with “turning the idea of a liberal media from an ideological belief into a political slogan and rallying cry around the nation” (179) through the use of such attacks. Wallace drew on a critique that developed out of the reaction of white Southerners to media coverage that they believed depicted them in a critical light. Although committed to covering the civil rights movement in a fair and professional manner, Greenberg (2008) said, “the movement’s strategy of non-​violence created a story in which one side was perpetrating violence while the other was victimized, often brutally—​leading to a dynamic that didn’t exactly lend itself to ‘balance’ ” (175). As such images circulated throughout the nation, white supremacists found themselves increasingly isolated in terms of public opinion and lashed out at the media (Greenberg 2008). Wallace then took advantage of opportunities afforded him during his bid for the presidential nomination to carry this message to a bigger audience. Appearing on Face the Nation on CBS on July 19, 1964, he said the media “try to slant and distort and malign and brainwashing [sic] this country. And I think that the American people haven’t been brainwashed, and I  think that the press and the national

 

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news media are going to get some of these liberal smiles wiped off their face” (quoted in Rosenfield 1969, 42). Other politicians adopted strategies similar to those employed by Wallace and Goldwater. It is not difficult to make a connection between their attacks on the media and the later efforts of President Richard Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, to convince a “Silent Majority” that liberal elites had no use for them. By encouraging conservatives to think of themselves as outsiders under attack by a liberal media and oppressed by a liberal Establishment, conservative publications and politicians cultivated an us-​versus-​them mentality that situated conservatives as perpetual outsiders. As Mark Major (2012) argued, “conservatives, despite their frequent claims to the contrary, are not a marginalized group” (459), but they successfully made that notion a core part of the conservative identity. For National Review, in particular, this strategy allowed it to divert attention from the conservative Establishment it came to represent, a tension Buckley managed by relying on what Nicole Hemmer (2016) called “elite populism” (xiv). The populist part of this equation referred to the ability of National Review—​as well as similarly situated conservative media—​to forge a connection between the intellectuals who wrote for the journal and the grassroots conservatives they sought to influence (Hemmer 2016). National Review reinforced the belief that the mainstream media betrayed a liberal bias and suggested it was useless to expect them to change. The media did not act as independent and objective observers as they claimed, the journal said, but as the propaganda arms of a liberal machine that disseminated the “liberal line” and of the liberal Establishment that invisibly controlled the political structure. Any departure from liberal orthodoxy threatened to cause a malfunction, so individual components of the machine kept the others on track. Rarely was this cause for concern, however, as the Establishment ensured that the liberal way of thinking permeated the political culture, allowing no space for alternative views to gain traction. It would be easy to interpret this argument as conspiratorial, but National Review’s discussion of liberal media bias and the American Establishment suggests a different reading. The journal’s emphasis on liberals’ demand for conformity and the smugness with which they wielded their influence, combined with the absence of an appeal to the mainstream media to incorporate more conservative viewpoints, suggest that the journal’s primary goal was not to stoke fear of the media or paranoia about their intentions among the public but rather to cultivate mistrust of and contempt for the media. The journal encouraged the public to question the accuracy of news content they encountered as well as the loyalties concealed beneath supposedly objective news coverage. National Review needed the mainstream media to serve as a foil, however; thus, the

 



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journal sought to undermine rather than to alter it. The existence of a deceitful mainstream media allowed National Review to position itself as a trustworthy alternative, much like four decades later when Fox News would seek to contrast its “fair and balanced” content with the presumably unfair and unbalanced coverage found elsewhere. By discrediting the mainstream media in this way, National Review helped to build a case for expanding the fledgling conservative media system. If the journal was correct and the mainstream media could not be trusted, the logical solution appeared to be for conservatives to turn to their own sources of information. National Review and Human Events continued to serve the conservative community despite ongoing financial struggles, and in 1966, Buckley inaugurated Firing Line, the televised debate program he would host for thirty-​three years. When President Ronald Reagan oversaw the repeal of the fairness doctrine in 1987, conservatives were primed for the right-​wing media that would develop over the following decades, including the Rush Limbaugh Show, Fox News, the Drudge Report, and Breitbart. Following in a tradition nurtured by National Review in the late 1950s, each of these perpetuates the image of conservatives and the audiences they serve as outsiders, even as they wield much influence within the political culture of the twenty-​first century.

References Barthel, Michael, and Amy Mitchell. 2017. “Americans’ Attitudes About the News Media Deeply Divided Along Partisan Lines.” Pew Research Center, May 10. Accessed June 19, 2018. http://​w ww.journalism.org/​2017/​05/​10/​americans-​attitudes-​about-​the-​news-​media-​ deeply-​divided-​along-​partisan-​lines/​. Bauer, A. J. 2018. “Journalism History and Conservative Erasure.” American Journalism 35 (1): 2–​26. British Broadcasting Corporation. 2011. “Church of England.” Last modified June 30, 2011. Accessed February 20, 2018. http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​religion/​religions/​christianity/​cofe/​ cofe_​1.shtml. Buckley, William F., Jr. n.d. “Selling Memo.” William F.  Buckley, Jr. Papers. Manuscripts and Archives. Yale University Library, box 2, folder 4. Buckley, William F., Jr. 1954. Letter to Clinton Davidson. December 23. William F. Buckley, Jr. Papers. Manuscripts and Archives. Yale University Library, box 2, folder 4. Buckley, William F., Jr. 1955. “Publisher’s Statement.” National Review, November 19. Buckley, William F., Jr. 1956a. “A Judgement on the Hughes Case.” National Review, February 22. Buckley, William F., Jr. 1956b. “The ‘Times’ Slays a Dragon.” National Review, January 25. Buckley, William F., Jr. 1962. “The Genteel Nightmare of Richard Rovere.” Harper’s Magazine, August. Chamberlain, John. 1964. “These Days:  The Phrase That Tipped the Scales.” King Features Syndicate, Richard H.  Rovere Papers. Library-​Archives Collections. Wisconsin Historical Society, box 4, folder 23. Chamberlain, William Henry. 1958. “Walter Lippmann: Defeatist.” National Review, December 6. de Toledano, Ralph. 1956. “Notes for a Controversy.” National Review, February 22.

 

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Fairlie, Henry. 1955. “Political Commentary.” The Spectator, September 23. http://​archive.spectator.co.uk/​article/​23rd-​september-​1955/​5/​political-​commentary. Fairlie, Henry. 1968. “Onward and Upward with the Arts.” New Yorker, October 19. Farber, David R. 2010. The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Farr, Finis. 1956. “Edward R. Murrow: Poet of Mankind.” National Review, July 11. Greenberg, David. 2008. “The Idea of ‘the Liberal Media’ and Its Roots in the Civil Rights Movement.” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 1 (2): 167–​186. Hart, Jeffrey. 2005. The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books. Hemmer, Nicole. 2016. Messengers of the Right:  Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jones, Jeffrey M., and Zacc Ritter. 2018. “Americans See More News Bias; Most Can’t Name Neutral Source.” Gallup, January 17. Accessed June 19, 2018. https://​news.gallup.com/​poll/​ 225755/​americans-​news-​bias-​name-​neutral-​source.aspx. Kendall, Willmoore. 1955. “The Liberal Line.” National Review, November 19. Kendall, Willmoore. 1956a. “The Printed Word.” National Review, January 25. Kendall, Willmoore. 1956b. “The Liberal Line.” National Review, March 7. Kendall, Willmoore. 1956c. “The Liberal Line.” National Review, May 9. Kendall, Willmoore. 1956d. “The Liberal Line.” National Review, August 18. Kendall, Willmoore. 1956e. “The Liberal Line.” National Review, November 24. Kendall, Willmoore. 1957a. “The Liberal Line.” National Review, March 9. Kendall, Willmoore. 1957b. “The Printed Word.” National Review, August 3. Kendall, Willmoore. 1957c. “The Liberal Line.” National Review, August 24. Lee, Michael J. 2014. Creating Conservatism: Postwar Words That Made an American Movement. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Lewis, Anthony. 1964. “Press Relations of Senator Good.” New  York Times, July 16. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times. Ludwig, Jack. 1964. “Some Comments on Senator Goldwater: Jack Ludwig.” Partisan Review, Fall. Major, Mark. 2012. “Objective but Not Impartial:  Human Events, Barry Goldwater, and the Development of the “Liberal Media” in the Conservative Counter-​Sphere.” New Political Science 34 (4): 455–​468. Taylor & Francis Current Content Access. McGirr, Lisa. 2001. Suburban Warriors:  The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Meyer, Frank S. 1957. “Principles and Heresies.” National Review, July 6. Meyer, Frank S. 1958. “Principles and Heresies.” National Review, October 11. Mitchell, Jonathan. 1956a. “The Printed Word.” National Review, February 1. Mitchell, Jonathan. 1956b. “The Printed Word.” National Review, March 14. Nash, George H. 1976. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. New York: Basic Books. Nash, George H. 2002. “The Place of Willmoore Kendall in American Conservatism.” In Willmoore Kendall: Maverick of American Conservatives, edited by John A. Murley and John E. Alvis, 3–​ 15. Lanham, Boulder, New York, and Oxford: Lexington Books. National Review. 1955a. “The Editors of National Review Believe.” November 19. National Review. 1955b. “The Magazine’s Credenda.” November 19. National Review. 1955c. “Regular Features.” November 19. National Review. 1956. “Platonic Sorrow?” December 22. National Review. 1957a. “At Bay.” June 8. National Review. 1957c. “Look Who’s Talking.” December 28. National Review. 1957d. “The Bodysnatchers.” April 20. National Review. 1964. “The Dialogue Begins.” January 28. Perlstein, Rick. (2001) 2009. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. Reprint, New York: Hill and Wang.

 



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Phillips-​Fein, Kim. 2011. “Conservatism:  A State of the field.” Journal of American History 98 (3): 723–​743. ProQuest Central. Rosenfield, Lawrence R. 1969. “Wallace Plays Rosemary’s Baby.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 55 (1): 36–​44. Rovere, Richard H. 1962a. “The American Establishment.” Esquire, May. Rovere, Richard H. 1962b. Letter to Mr. Gass. May 16. Richard H.  Rovere Papers. Library-​ Archives Collections. Wisconsin Historical Society, box 7, folder 3. Rovere, Richard H. 1962c. “Shall We Let Buckley into the Establishment?” Harper’s, September. Rusher, William A. 1957. “Report from the Publisher.” National Review, July 27. Schlafly, Phyllis. 1964. A Choice Not an Echo. Alton, IL: Pere Marquette Press. Sivek, Susan Currie. 2008. “Editing Conservatism: How National Review Magazine Framed and Mobilized a Political Movement.” Mass Communication and Society 11 (3): 248–​274. Swift, Art. 2017. “Six in 10 in U.S. See Partisan Bias in News Media.” Gallup, April 5. Accessed June 19, 2018. https://​news.gallup.com/​poll/​207794/​six-​partisan-​bias-​news-​media.aspx. United Press International. 1964. “Senator Charges Lies to the Press.” New York Times, July 18. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times. Viguerie, Richard A., and David Franke. 2004. America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power. Chicago and Los Angeles: Bonus Books. White, Theodore H. 1965. The Making of the President 1964. New York: Atheneum Publishers.

 

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National Review and the Changing Narrative of Civil Rights  Memory 1968–​2016 Robert Greene II

On August 28, 2010, a rally was held in Washington, DC to galvanize Americans during a period of political and economic uncertainty while also marking the forty-​seventh anniversary of the famed March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. This rally was, in many ways, just the latest in a long American tradition of marches in—​and on—​Washington, designed to gain national support for a variety of causes. The high point of the civil rights movement’s protest tactics may very well have been the March on Washington in August of 1963. Protests against the Vietnam War culminated with large-​scale marches in Washington in 1965, 1967, and 1969. The LGBTQ movement made its presence felt in national politics with a large march in 1987. But this 2010 march was different—​it was launched by conservative interests, led by television personality Glenn Beck. During his speech, Beck argued that he felt a kinship with Martin Luther King Jr. “I think I can relate to Martin Luther King out of all these giants,” Beck said, comparing King to other American historical figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who already had monuments in Washington (the Martin Luther King monument had not yet been built). “He’s still a man and that’s the message. That man makes a difference.” There was only mention of King as a historical apparition—​nothing about his actual words or deeds, simply the fact that he was a hero to the American people was all that mattered (Beck 2010). What made Beck’s address all the more startling was that Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King Jr. and a pro-​life conservative activist, also spoke at Beck’s rally. When pressed about whether she was fine with Beck utilizing King’s message for his own political ends, Alveda King argued, “We are not here to divide. 174

 



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I’m about unity” (quoted in Dolak 2010). Alveda King’s remarks provided cover to Beck, as the Fox News personality continued a tradition of American conservatives using a tranquil, nonthreatening memory of the civil rights movement to push their own agenda. The conservative publication National Review was often at the forefront of promoting such politicized memories of the past. American popular memory of the civil rights movement has been shaped, in large part, by both mainstream news and various ideological publications. National Review, a chief voice for the American Right since its founding in 1955, has performed this role for American conservatives (see also Lane, this volume). In the process, the magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley, and many conservative intellectuals have shaped—​and reshaped—​how a large number of Americans recall the exploits of Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and many other activists. This chapter argues that the pages of National Review reveal how conservatives slowly changed their views of the civil rights movement. Where this chapter begins, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., conservatives were still deeply opposed to King and his radical shift to the left. However, as time went by, conservatives writing for National Review went from reviling King and other civil rights leaders to using them for their own political ends. This shift in thinking helped effect a national shift in how most Americans viewed King and his civil rights allies. At the same time, National Review cultivated a memory of the movement that was favorable to conservative causes. Their construction of this narrative allowed them to use King and other historical figures as weapons against later civil rights and liberal icons, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. This use of a certain kind of memory of the civil rights movement succeeded in further muddying the waters between memory and history, along with further weakening liberals’ claims on some of their greatest political victories of the last sixty years. Finally, this chapter will underscore how much of this narrative has become part of the larger national memory of the civil rights movement, with liberals and academics alike struggling to push back against it. The occasion of Martin Luther King Jr. Day especially frustrates more radical left activists, who wish to utilize the words and actions of King for their own political purposes—​often frustrated by how much the mainstream narrative has been affected by conservative writers. Ultimately, the chapter itself will navigate several key moments in the civil rights movement—​including the March on Washington and the debate about the Civil Rights Act in 1964—​as well as detailing how memory of the civil rights movement was shaped by the 1980s reckoning with the past (against the backdrop of the early Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations), the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, and the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington in 2013 (along with the concurrent rise of Black Lives Matter during that same period).

 

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As other chapters in this volume demonstrate, conservative news involves crafting narratives that help situate the political, social, and cultural project of modern conservatism as a beleaguered but benevolent thread of the American national tapestry. The memory of the civil rights movement, and its place within how conservatives see themselves and America, is a case in point. National Review’s history mirrors that of the larger conservative movement: from being comfortable with opposing civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s to utilizing the language of civil rights activists in the past to oppose modern initiatives around the Black Lives Matter campaign. The magazine’s shifting stance on race exemplifies the connectivity of the conservative ideological project with the contingencies of public opinion and the news of the day. It also evidences the role of conservative news in renarrating US history. Americans’ memories of their national past do not always match up to how historians interpret US history. There is often a tension between historical “memory” and the complicated historical narratives researched and written by historians. This has been seen most explicitly with the American Civil War, where a narrative based around “States’ rights” and downplaying the centrality of slavery to the conflict governed the memory of most white Americans of the conflict from the late nineteenth century until just after the civil rights movement of the 1960s. As David Blight wrote in Race and Reunion, those who desired to bring North and South back together again as one nation “used and trumped race” in the process—​using appeals to white racial unity, while ignoring the plight of African Americans in their midst, to craft a “reconciliationist” memory of the Civil War and its aftermath (Blight 2001). Other works by historians of the civil rights era have begun to emphasize the more recent links between politics and memory. David Chappell’s (2014) Waking from the Dream explores partisan battles over making Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday, the rise and fall of Jesse Jackson as a national political icon, and the vacuum of civil rights leadership after King’s assassination in 1968.1 For Chappell, memory of King’s activism in the immediate aftermath of his assassination was a driving force in the passage of Civil Rights Act of 1968 (or the Fair Housing Act), which outlawed housing discrimination in the United States and was passed in the wake of King’s assassination. “The story of the continuing struggle for rights and equality after 1968 is central to the meaning of freedom in America,” Chappell (2014, xiii) argued, yet this has been largely obscured by a triumphalist narrative of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Jeanne Theoharis’s (2013, 2018) books on Rosa Parks, The Rebellious

  The scholarship on memory and civil rights is still growing, but important works in this field also include Romano and Raiford (2006) and Holloway (2013). 1

 



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Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, and civil rights memory more broadly, A More Beautiful and Terrible History, are both attempts to recenter the memory of Parks, King, and the civil rights movement itself in a more radical history of American protest movements overall. This is also an attempt to rescue this memory from use by moderates and conservatives who tend to gloss over the radicalism of many civil rights activists. Partisan use of memory has a long history in the United States (Blight 2001; Young 1999; Lepore 2010; Gilpin 2011).2 The arguments about civil rights memory are different from the academic debates currently raging about the “long civil rights movement” thesis. That debate centers on when the civil rights movement began and where geographically it should be centered. However, the essay that started the “long civil rights movement” debates should not be remembered solely for that contribution. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (2005) argues that expanding the period of the civil rights movement would help counter conservative appropriation of civil rights memory, which began in the 1970s alongside the rise of the “New Right” in American politics (see DiBranco, this volume). In Hall’s view, the New Right “insisted that color-​blindness—​defined as the elimination of racial classifications and the establishment of formal equality before the law” was their movement’s only goal—​that modern conservatism, not liberalism, was “the true inheritor of the civil rights legacy” (1237). As Hall noted, “Clearly, the stories we tell about the civil rights movement matter; they shape how we see our own world” (1239). The modern conservative movement, it turns out, has been highly attuned to this insight since its outset—​even before its color-​blind turn.

National Review and the Early Years of the Civil Rights Movement From the founding of National Review in 1955, William F. Buckley made it clear that his magazine steadfastly opposed the civil rights movement. In a 1957 column, Buckley argued against the then-​growing movement based on defense of Southern traditions and civilization. He wrote that segregation made sense in the South because the “the White community merely intends to prevail—​that is all” (Buckley 1957, 149). Buckley claimed that white Southerners had every 2   In Shoemaker and the Tea Party, Young makes a compelling case for the Boston Tea Party being used by American partisans in the 1830s as a seminal historical event to create renewed patriotic fervor. The Whites of Their Eyes updates the story of memory and the Tea Party for the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, while John Brown Still Lives demonstrates that white liberals, white southerners, and African Americans all have different “memories” of John Brown and his martyrdom.

 

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reason to enforce segregation as they were “the advanced race.” Jim Crow was, in his estimation, what it took to “impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races.” By 1963, the magazine’s general stance on civil rights had changed little. They viewed the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom as a mistake, calling it “mob-​deployment” and believing it to damage the hope for further interracial cooperation. Their skepticism also included the very idea of a civil rights bill: “Solomon himself could not come up with a law of the land,” the National Review (1963) argued, “which would drain the resentments of James Baldwin when he is refused a drink at the airport in Chicago, or insulted by a policeman in Times Square” (140). The March on Washington was not only an example of mob rule but also a protest in favor of a civil rights bill many of the conservatives at the National Review believed was ill timed and ill thought out. The magazine also hosted essays by the stalwart white Southern intellectual, and prominent civil rights opponent, James J. Kilpatrick. A native of Virginia, Kilpatrick (1963) argued that, while the eventual Civil Rights Act of 1964 “may be well-​intentioned,” it in fact threatened to “impose some fateful compulsions on another group of citizens” (231) to achieve civil rights equality for African Americans. His arguments were not race based, but instead centered around a conservative interpretation of the Constitution. Kilpatrick believed that if the Civil Rights Act passed, it would give the president “the powers of a despot” (236). By the middle of the 1960s, the conservative movement had to adjust to the changing fortunes of the civil rights movement. With the movement’s achievement of a Civil Rights Act in 1964 and a Voting Rights Act in 1965, opposition to those goals no longer seemed politically possible even for conservatives. Instead, as was the case with the rest of the nation, conservatives would have to adjust to the rise of Black Power in the United States and the waning power of Cold War liberalism. The attempt on James Meredith’s life in the summer of 1966, during his “March Against Fear” in Mississippi, gave the magazine a chance to argue once again for the sanctity of Southern culture—​albeit within the caveat of allowing the region to investigate civil rights abuses on its own. The attempt on Meredith’s life, the National Review’s (1966a) editors lamented, was surely going to be blamed on the South as a whole. “But something caused him to do just that, something plus booze apparently, and the South is, as usual, being asked to pay,” they argued (611). Within this worry about how the attempted murder would be perceived was the National Review’s editorial board acknowledging that this shot taken at Meredith could be used to pass yet another civil rights bill. They also believed that some Americans—​likely liberals—​saw the South as a “diseased part of the United States” and that any violence against civil rights activists could give the federal government all the more reason to

 



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intervene in the region once again. Conservatives at the National Review could no longer press opposition to civil rights based around a pro–​white supremacist rationale. But they did continue to voice concern about the federal government gaining more powers at the expense of Southern states. The post-​1965 consensus on the basic goodness of supporting civil rights even, to an extent, influenced the National Review’s early stance on the Black Power movement. A movement with its ideological origins in the Black nationalist campaigns of the early and mid-​twentieth century, Black Power became a national concern when civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael invoked the phrase during the Mississippi marches organized as a response to the attempt on James Meredith’s life in the summer of 1966. The editors at National Review (1966b) saw the Black Power movement as exposing brewing schisms within the African American intellectual and political classes. They argued that “confusion . . . about what is to be the direction of the civil rights movement now that all has been done that can be done in the way of legislation, dramatization, and judicial decree” (136) explained the rise of the Black Power Movement, and the inability of civil rights leaders, such as Bayard Rustin or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) executive director Roy Wilkins, to be able to adequately satisfy the demands of younger activists. In some sense, the conservatives at National Review were making a pitch for Black Power as an ostensibly conservative movement in American life. “But the Black Power folk, not all of whom are street-​corner agitators, deserve to be heard. They are holding that the Negro must cease trying to please the white man and please himself, must control his own schools, his own businesses, his own way of life, his own destiny,” they wrote. No more use of a large, federal bureaucracy to enforce social equality—​instead, it would be a new clarion call for Black self-​ reliance that could serve as a key rallying point for African Americans. This provides an important context to how the National Review’s editors would begin to criticize future attempts at pro–​civil rights reforms: keeping to a condemnation of future government programs, while respecting the basic right of African Americans to be treated the same as any other group of citizens. These are examples of the kinds of arguments conservatives within the National Review promulgated during and after the civil rights movement. Before 1964, civil rights were wrong based on a constitutional rationale but also, primarily, because the two races were not equal. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, civil rights were a laudable goal but threatened to destroy the separation of powers within the US Constitution. Either way, the demands made by Martin Luther King Jr. and so many other civil rights activists were opposed by most of the conservatives at the National Review. Eventually, however, conservatism in the United States would have to adjust to a “new normal,” where support for racism was frowned upon in the

 

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public sphere, and every politician and intellectual had to give at least some lip service to racial equality. This is what made the National Review’s embrace of civil rights by the end of the twentieth century a necessity. It is also likely that many conservatives, like most Americans, had a genuine change of heart about racial equality between whites and Blacks. But it had to be justified within a conservative ideology of “color-​blindness.” This is where the conservative version of civil rights memory comes into play. This shift by the conservatives at National Review and elsewhere also allowed them to forget what King himself said about the problems of the American conservative movement during his lifetime. By the end of his life, King repeatedly lamented the political power of both white moderates and white conservatives in American politics. He wrote in his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here?, that the problem of white backlash politics—​w hich threatened to undo the tenuous gains of the civil rights movement—​was born out of an “expression of the same vacillations, the same search for rationalizations, the same lack of commitment that have always characterized white America on the question of race” (King [1967] 2010, 72). Further, he attacked the Republican Party’s right-​ward shift with the nomination of Barry Goldwater for president in 1964: “the illustrious ghost of Abraham Lincoln is not sufficient for winning Negro confidence,” King warned, “not so long as the party fails to shrink the influence of its ultra-​right wing” (155). The conservative mantra of the National Review was not the kind of politics King had in mind as he continued his campaign for civil, and human, rights throughout the late 1960s.

Conservative America and National Review’s Tackling of the Civil Rights Legacy By the early 1980s, ideas about race—​and racism—​had changed in American society. Reflecting the longer history of race construction in the United States, by the 1980s overt expressions of racism were simply not allowed in mainstream political discourse. The concept of “racecraft,” promulgated by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields (2012), is a useful idea in this context. Understanding how “racecraft” is, in their words, the “mental terrain and . . . pervasive belief ” (18) surrounding race in American society allows for an understanding of how, for example, some conservatives could make an argument in favor of segregation in the 1950s and dismiss the same arguments by 1970. The shifting terrain of race in the pages of the National Review reflects this changing relationship of race, racism, and citizenship in American society (e.g., Omi and Winant 2015; Kendi 2016).

 



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Much of the National Review’s reservations about creating a holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1980s were based on assumptions that he was at best willing to allow communists within the civil rights movement and was at worst a possible dupe of the Soviet Union. President Ronald Reagan’s reluctance to support the King holiday in 1983 was primarily due to concerns that King was controlled by communists. The National Review (1983) agreed with this concern. Reagan believed that the beloved Martin Luther King—​who, by 1983, had risen in stature as a genuine American hero for most people—​was an “image, not reality” (1382). Whether or not Martin Luther King had hammer-​and-​sickle-​ shaped skeletons in the closet, Reagan could not be sure. “We’ll know in about 35 years, won’t we?” President Reagan joked, when asked about King’s possible ties to communists in relationship to the FBI files that would not be opened until 2012. National Review writers agreed with this and argued that most policymakers knew King at least had communist sympathizers in the movement. “Knew it, and ignored it,” they argued (1382). However, while National Review still showcased concern about King’s leftist leanings, they did not condemn civil rights or the movement as a whole: “Congress also wished, however, to admit into the American pantheon an ethnic symbol—​a common, and honorable, procedure—​and to memorialize a leader whose rhetoric, at its best, appealed to all-​American principles of justice and rights” (1382). At the end of 1983, despite the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday being passed by Congress and signed into law by President Reagan, there were some conservatives still not satisfied with the secular sainthood given to Dr. King. In his review of the David Garrow book The FBI and Martin Luther King:  From Operation “Solo” to Memphis, conservative intellectual Joseph Sobran (1983) argued against the growing public perception of King as a liberal, reformist hero. Sobran began his review by noting the different ways liberals viewed foreign communist powers versus how they viewed domestic communists. The foreign powers were seen as dangerous, while domestic Marxists were either ignored or in the case of King, Sobran argued, embraced by the liberal mainstream. “David J. Garrow has written an account of the FBI’s secret surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King Jr. that crazily manages to sustain both the facts (they appear to be scrupulously recorded) and the prescribed liberal attitudes,” Sobran wrote, unable to fathom how Garrow could analyze the FBI files on King, know of his left-​wing leanings, and still defend the man (1617). Sobran mocks the viewpoint of Garrow and others, who brushed aside King’s relationships with a variety of left-​wing individuals, such as Bayard Rustin, who may have had communist leanings earlier in their careers. “But we are not to worry about Communism. Nor should we suspect that sympathy with Communism could ever be a ‘problem’ among ourselves. Any interest as to such sympathy is simply prurient,” wrote Sobran, echoing the National Review’s concerns about

 

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communist influences on American society during the Cold War (1618). What is interesting, and worth noting due to their partisan biases, is that both the National Review and The Progressive viewed King as a revolutionary radical. For Sobran, of course, this is not something to lionize but instead needed to be critiqued. And Sobran defended those who were attacked by Garrow and others for pointing out King’s radical background from a conservative viewpoint. “It’s just that Garrow doesn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with King’s radicalism, whereas the FBI’s behavior comes in for judgments like ‘racist,’ ‘vicious,’ and ‘pernicious,’ ” Sobran argued, defending the FBI’s investigation of King and finding him unworthy of being an American hero. Also taking note of the allegations of extramarital affairs leveled against King by Jesse Helms and others, Sobran condemned King, arguing that “King was leading a hypocritical double life,” both politically and personally (1617). Sobran ends his condemnation with a statement that illustrates a conservative view of King, only twenty years after the high point of the civil rights movement: “King was offering a serious challenge to a whole social order” (1618). By the end of the 1980s, King’s legacy was being used both to prop up the idea of a color-​blind America and to criticize the liberal failings on race since the late 1960s. The conservative intellectual Michael Novak (1986) lamented that King would have despaired over the kind of breakdown of the African American family at the heart of the 1987 CBS documentary The Vanishing Family. Novak goes so far as to call for a second War on Poverty, but with a “moral focus,” presumably one King himself would have approved of (in Novak’s thinking, at least). Novak and other conservative intellectuals tended to separate the civil rights triumphs of the 1960s from the perceived policy failures of the Great Society—​often putting aside the fact that leaders like King felt the Great Society had not gone far enough and was woefully underfunded for the task of fighting poverty across America. For the National Review, both the presidential election and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 would push them to once again reflect on civil rights memory. In this case, they sought to separate being ostensibly in favor of civil rights from the Great Society programs of the Lyndon Johnson administration. Memory of the civil rights movement in the pages of the National Review reflected, therefore, an assumption that the “culture wars” of the sixties were continuing into the eighties and nineties and had to be fought against the forces of the Left. The 1992 Los Angeles Riots offered yet another moment for conservatives to discuss the sixties and the associated liberal mistakes of that era. Harold Johnson’s (1992) “The Fire This Time” was the first take on the riots published in the National Review. No doubt the title was a take on James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” and his reflections on Black rage and Black oppression in America. Johnson, however, has no sympathy for the rioters. “The first battalions

 



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on the scene were not the military, but the apologists. Of course rioting is wrong and self-​defeating, went their ritual disclaimer, but nevertheless,” he wrote (17). Here, Johnson attacked liberal explanations. Furthermore, he tied back to Jesse Jackson and others the “true” lessons of the riots: “The irony, of course, is that the bitterness nursed by many blacks is largely the bequest of people like Reverend Jackson and Representative (Maxine) Waters, who have a stake in fomenting divisive race-​consciousness” (17). Johnson did admit that he also believed the not guilty verdict was the wrong one in the Rodney King case, but also argued that other reasons could have led the jury to select that option (such as poor work by the prosecution). The fault for the riots, Johnson believed, is with a moral decay in American society. He noted that the day the riots began, the school system in Los Angeles was about to give away condoms in high schools. Johnson followed this up by asking, “Is it a stretch to see a symbolic link? The condom program is part of a larger phenomenon—​the jettisoning from public life of objective moral norms and any pretense to moral authority” (18). The following issue for the National Review (1992) led with a front-​page image from the Los Angeles riots of a Hispanic man walking from a burning store with a caseload of Coca-​Cola soft drink. The main caption read, “How to Get a Week’s Groceries Absolutely Free, PLUS, $600 Million in Federal Aid.” In this issue, several conservative intellectuals offered their take on why the riots occurred. Ed Rubenstein (1992), for instance, provided data to show that social spending was not the cause of the riots. He condemned Bill Clinton’s argument that the riots were due to “12 years of denial and neglect” and pointed out that “federal social spending rose by nearly 10 percent in real terms during the Reagan years, and another 20 percent during the first three Bush years” (16). Rubenstein argued that while the eighties economy boomed, families headed by Black single parents were not able to benefit. He mused, “If the Eighties economy couldn’t lure black youths back into the labor force, there is little prospect of purely economic incentives reversing the inner-​city slide. We will have to look outside economics for answers” (16). What those answers are, however, he did not provide. The magazine also used cartoons to play up the idea of the Great Society being at fault. One cartoon showed a cowboy hat–​clad President Bush putting up a “Wanted” sign for Lyndon Johnson, with the headline, “Wanted for Arson, Looting, Inciting to Riot” (“Wanted for Arson” 1992, 29). More important, however, was the declaration of such intellectuals as Charles Murray (1992) as to the root causes of the riot. Murray found the riots an opportunity to speak to the fears of the white community. He argued that there were two key interpretations of the event. First, “the Rodney King verdict was an expression of white fear about black crime, and this fear is grounded in reality.” Second, “the white reaction to the riots will be profoundly different from the reaction in the 1960s, because a consensus of whites no longer accepts that whites are

 

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to blame for black problems. This shift in opinion is also grounded in reality” (30). Murray blamed the War on Poverty, born from white “contrition” for slavery and segregation, for the atmosphere that created the riots. He also linked cultural trends with a white backlash against liberalism, noting the amount of police shows on television. Murray argued that the police on television and in real life are seen as “a thin blue line . . . holding back some very scary people” (31). Here, civil rights memory became enmeshed with memory of the Great Society: where one succeeded, the other failed. In other words, for Murray and other conservatives, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were enough and needed, but the War on Poverty and the Great Society programs were to be condemned. Alan Keyes (1992), African American conservative, also weighed in on the controversy. Keyes actually argued that both conservatives and liberals, in looking for economic solutions to the problem, were wrong. Instead, he contended that the key cause of the riots was “fear. Fear turned the accused policemen from professionals into thugs. It prejudiced the judgment of the jurors” (38). Keyes argued for a new community empowerment, filled with neighborhood councils and an elected neighborhood sheriff. Keyes attempted to get away from simply blaming the Great Society and instead encouraged embracing local self-​government. What his argument shows is that conservative viewpoints on the riots were not monolithic. They were, however, born out of a memory that condemned the Great Society and the excesses of the post–​civil rights era.

Postracial America and the Memory of Civil Rights In more recent takes on civil rights and the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., he has become—​for conservatives—​a way in which to criticize modern liberalism’s showdown with conservatives over racism. Kevin Williamson (2013), a writer for National Review, argued that King would have disagreed with the modern Left’s insistence on racism being behind so much of modern conservatism: To accuse a person or a movement of racism is a serious thing. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had a deep appreciation of that fact, which is one of the reasons he often pointed out that Barry Goldwater was not himself a racist, though he opposed civil-​rights measures for which the Reverend King and his associates fought and bled. Perhaps there is something about the literal bleeding for a cause that makes men more serious. (33–​35)

 



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For Williamson it was important to distinguish between the movement led by King and the modern liberalism with which the National Review is still doing ideological battle today. This is not to say that liberals have not pushed back, time and again, on the question of remembering the lessons of the civil rights movement. Glenn Beck’s 2010 “Restoring Honor” rally at the National Mall on the anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech drew considerable ire from many civil rights leaders and liberals. Beck (quoted in Sisk 2010) argued, in response, that “blacks don’t own Martin Luther King,” showing in many ways how King himself has become a mainstream figure even for conservatives—​this, despite the fact that only thirty years previously, a conservative president raised serious questions about King being worthy of a federal holiday. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-​first century, conservatives in the United States underwent a vigorous debate about their role in stymying the progress of African American civil rights during and after the civil rights movement. In 2005, then-​Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized for the Republican Party’s utilization of the “Southern Strategy” in presidential campaigns in the late 1960s and throughout the rest of the twentieth century. He argued to an audience of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) members that the GOP had failed to “effectively reach out” to African American voters in the aftermath of the civil rights movement (quoted in Allen 2005). William F. Buckley himself publicly discussed his own change in opinion on civil rights for African Americans. By 1965, during his run for mayor of New York City, Buckley had announced support for a form of affirmative action; by the end of that decade, he would tour urban areas at the invitation of the Urban League and endorse greater participation by African Americans in the political sphere. Some of this, no doubt, was due to national changes in attitudes on race and racism. Coupled with Buckley’s own personal changing views on racism, it shows how even the dean of modern conservatism felt the need to re-​evaluate how he viewed race in America (see Felzenberg 2017). Conservatives continued to wrestle with the legacy of the civil rights movement, and the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was as good an occasion as any to think deeply about that history. The National Review used the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington to reflect on how far the nation as a whole had come on civil rights. The September 16, 2013, issue of National Review included an essay by Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom (2013). Authors of the book America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, they took to the pages of the venerable conservative journal both to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s fabled “I Have a Dream” speech and to push the idea that much had changed in those

 

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fifty years. Arguing against what they saw as the “pervasive” claim among civil rights activists and the Barack Obama administration, the Thernstroms believed that numerous trends in interracial friendships, dating, and the movement of middle-​class African Americans to the suburbs were all proof that the civil rights movement had worked—​and that, in their words, “the last thing we need is more social engineering to eradicate every racial disparity.” It was a symbol of the optimism with which many American conservatives viewed the civil rights movement: it achieved most of its objectives, it was good for the nation, and no new legislation was needed. Much of this belief was shaped by the patient reconstruction of civil rights memory by American conservatives (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2013, 28–​30). The website for National Review published several essays on the topic; however, the essay “Marching in Time” summarized the long road American conservatism had taken to get to a point where the movement accepted civil rights. It also argued that the original civil rights movement was in fact a conservative campaign for equality. “The civil rights revolution, like the American revolution, was in a crucial sense conservative: It did not seek to invent rights, but to secure ones that the government already respected in principle,” began the National Review’s (2013) editors in their tribute to a safe and sanitized civil rights movement. Calling on Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the editors at the National Review referred to the speech as a “thorough, if implicit, repudiation of all anti-​ Americanism.” For them, the speech was not so much a critique of the United States as it was a clarion call for the United States to be the kind of nation it purported to be. The National Review’s editors did not, however, shy away from the fact that their predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s were adamantly opposed to civil rights legislation. “They worried about the effects of the civil-​rights movement on federalism and limited government,” lamented the editors. “Those principles weren’t wrong, exactly; they were tragically misapplied, given the moral and historical context. It is a mark of the success of King’s movement that almost all Americans can now see its necessity” (“Marching in Time” 2013). It was a tragic mark of the era, in other words, that the editors put those ideals above the necessity of equal rights for African Americans. Nothing is mentioned here about the magazine’s defense of white supremacy in the South—​only the overzealousness of defending conservative and libertarian ideals. However, this did not stop the editors from using this memory of the civil rights movement to criticize the current heirs of the movement, such as Al Sharpton. The success of the earlier movement meant that today’s leaders could lead, in the estimation of the editors of National Review, a movement based more on grievances and less on the constitutional principles that (in their retelling of

 



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history) pushed forward the 1960s movement. “Where (King) spoke of a ‘bank of justice,’ they just trade in grievances,” the editors argued. “Today Al Sharpton, whose chief political success has been to foment enough racial hatred to yield arson and murder, can present himself as a civil-​rights leader without much fear of contradiction” (“Marching in Time” 2013). Clearly, for them, Sharpton is no Martin Luther King Jr. Anticipating critiques from historians and activists alike, who have argued for decades that King’s historical image is at odds with his actual words and deeds, the National Review editors merely argued that this difference between perception and reality did not matter. To quote, in full: On anniversaries like this one, left-​wingers sometimes lament that King is not remembered in full. They say that he was hostile to capitalism and to the Vietnam War. It is a historically accurate point, and it is a historically irrelevant point. King is a national hero because of the American ideals he championed and brought much closer to realization. It is the march of those ideals that we commemorate this week. (“Marching in Time” 2013) They acknowledge the uneasy tension between historical memory and actual history—​and dismiss it. For the editors of the National Review, the radical, left-​w ing King existed but, ultimately, did not matter to history. What did matter for them, and for the shift of American conservatism to an accommodation with civil rights for African Americans, were the ways that King’s words, and the legacy of the civil rights movement, could be used for conservative political ends in the present day. This debate continues with the presence of Donald Trump in the White House. When he formally proclaimed the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 2018, he was inundated by criticism from historians and activists alike who felt President Trump’s very presence in the White House was an affront to Dr. King’s vision for American society. Where former Trump adviser, and architect of the “alt-​ right,” Steve Bannon argued Dr.  King would have been “proud” of Trump’s achievements in low unemployment of African Americans, King’s daughter Bernice warned that her father would have been “extremely disturbed” by modern America’s political climate (see Buncombe 2018). The incident is, in many ways, a reminder that the debate over conservatism’s relationship to the memory of civil rights in American history is one that has not yet ended. As conservatism in America continues to wrestle with the problem of racism, the ways conservatives remember the past provides a key to how they may deal with race in the present.

 

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References Allen, Mike. 2005. “RNC Chief to Say It Was ‘Wrong’ to Exploit Racial Conflict for Votes.” Washington Post, July 14. http://​www.washingtonpost.com/​wp-​dyn/​content/​article/​ 2005/​07/​13/​AR2005071302342.html. Beck, Glenn. 2010. “American Rhetoric: Glenn Beck: Keynote Address at the Restoring Honor Rally.” American Rhetoric Online Speech Bank, August 28. https://​www.americanrhetoric. com/​speeches/​glennbeckrestoringhonorkeynote.htm. Blight, David W. 2001. Race and Reunion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buckley, William F. 1957. “Why the South Must Prevail.” National Review, August 24. Buncombe, Andrew. 2018. “MLK’s Daughter Says Her Father Would Be ‘Extremely Disturbed’ by Donald Trump.” The Independent, May 24. https://​www.independent.co.uk/​news/​world/​ americas/​us-​politics/​trump-​martin-​luther-​king-​daughter-​steve-​bannon-​bernice-​king-​bbc-​ twitter-​a8367321.html. Chappell, David L. 2014. Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Random House Publishing Group. Dolak, Kevin. 2010. “MLK’s Niece Alveda King Courts Controversy.” ABC News, August 28. https://​abcnews.go.com/​Politics/​alveda-​king-​speaks-​glenn-​becks-​dc-​rally/​ story?id=11504453. Felzenberg, Alvin. 2017. “How William F.  Buckley, Jr., Changed His Mind on Civil Rights.” Politico, May 13. https://​www.politico.com/​magazine/​story/​2017/​05/​13/​ william-​f-​buckley-​civil-​rights-​215129. Fields, Karen, and Barbara J. Fields. 2012. Racecraft:  The Soul of Inequality in American Life. New York: Verso Books. Gilpin, R. Blakeslee. 2011. John Brown Still Lives! America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, & Change. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. 2005. “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past.” Journal of American History 91 (4): 1233–​1263. Holloway, Jonathan Scott. 2013. Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America since 1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Johnson, Harold. 1992. “The Fire This Time.” National Review, May 25. Kendi, Ibram X. 2016. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books. Keyes, Alan. 1992. “Restoring Community.” National Review, June 8. Kilpatrick, James J. 1963. “Civil Rights and Legal Wrongs.” National Review, September 24: 231–​236. King, Martin Luther, Jr. [1967] 2010. Where Do We Go from Here:  Chaos or Community? Boston: Beacon Press. Lepore, Jill. 2010. The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Murray, Charles. 1992. “Causes, Root Causes, and Cures.” National Review, June 8. National Review. 1963. “When the Plaints Go Marching In.” September 24. National Review. 1966a. “How Guilty Is the South.” June 28. National Review. 1966b. “Here Lies Integration.” December 27. National Review. 1983. “Comrade King?” November 11. National Review. 1992. “Wanted for Arson, Looting, Inciting to Riot.” June 8. National Review. 2013. “Marching in Time.” August 28. https://​www.nationalreview.com/​2013/​ 08/​marching-​time-​editors/​. Novak, Michael. 1986. “The Content of Their Character.” National Review, February 28. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 2015. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge.

 



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Romano, Renee Christine, and Leigh Raiford, eds. 2006. The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Rubenstein, Ed. 1992. “Why the Poor Stay Poor.” National Review, June 8. Sisk, Richard. 2010. “Glenn Beck Rally on Anniversary of Martin Luther King Speech, Featuring Palin, Draws Ire of Sharpton.” NY Daily News, August 26. http://​www.nydailynews.com/​ news/​national/​glenn-​beck-​rally-​anniversary-​martin-​luther-​king-​speech-​featuring-​palin-​ draws-​ire-​sharpton-​article-​1.200842. Sobran, Joseph. 1983. “Gentleman’s Agreement.” National Review, December 23. Theoharis, Jeanne. 2013. The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Boston: Beacon Press. Theoharis, Jeanne. 2018. A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History. Boston: Beacon Press. Thernstrom, Stephan, and Abigail Thernstrom. 2013. “The Status of the Dream.” National Review, September 16. Williamson, Kevin. 2013. “Racism! Squirrel!” National Review, December 31. Young, Alfred F. 1999. The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution. Boston: Beacon Press.

 

11

Slanting the News Media Bias and Its Effects Anthony DiMaggio

In 2017, more than half of Republicans named Fox News their most trusted news source, although less than a quarter of independents and only 4 percent of Democrats did so. More than three-​quarters of Fox News viewers looked at President Donald Trump favorably, despite most Americans holding an unfavorable view (Bump 2017). These findings speak to a media environment in which conservatives are more likely than liberals to self-​select into consuming media that share their pre-​ existing attitudes and ideology. But the broader question of whether partisan media merely play to the biases of viewers or create and intensify such biases is still debated. In this chapter, I argue that both processes are at work. Partisan media do preach to the choir, but they also contribute to polarization by impacting political opinions. This process, however, is not equal across partisan media. Examining cable media outlets, I document how polarization is largely a force at work on the American right. I provide evidence—​via public exposure to Fox News—​of the significance of what Mark Major (this volume) terms the “conservative countersphere” and the role it plays in reinforcing and cultivating conservative political views among the news-​consuming public.

What We Know About Media Bias The narrative of a “liberal media elite” has become pervasive in conservative media discourse (see especially Lane and Major, this volume). But contrary to claims from conservative politicians and pundits, there is little evidence of such a bias. Instead, a growing right-​wing bias is increasingly apparent, with conservative “free market” economic views dominating political and media discourse. 190

 



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Recognizing that this right-​wing bias dominates in the news is necessary if we are to better understand the rise of conservative media and their effects in the United States. The rightward shift in US news is evident in so-​called objective news media, which often uncritically disseminate the economic views of two political parties that have moved to the right in their economic positions, and with the rise of a right-​wing “echo chamber” via political talk radio and Fox News. This shift in discourse has had significant effects on public opinion, pushing consumers of right-​wing media to become more conservative in their politics and less likely to be exposed to competing viewpoints. In 2017, nearly two-​thirds of Americans believed the media were biased by favoring one party over the other, and a large majority of those agreeing felt journalists favored Democrats (Swift 2017). Various academics (Theberge 1981; Thomas and LeShay 1992; Kuypers 2002; Schiffer 2006; Lowry 2008; Groseclose 2011) and media pundits (Coulter 2002; Hannity 2002; Goldberg 2001, 2003; Bozell 2004) also embrace this claim. But the evidence for liberal bias is weak. Conservative pundits are well represented in newspapers (DiMaggio 2017a). Fox News is the most watched cable news outlet, and approximately 90 percent of talk radio is conservative (Halpin et al. 2007; Samuels 2017). Despite the rhetoric that dominates the conservative countersphere, there is little evidence that news reporting favors liberals or Democrats (D’Alessio 2012). My research examines reporting of domestic and foreign policy issues across dozens of case studies from the 1990s to the mid-​2010s and uncovers evidence of numerous biases, although none are liberal. In foreign policy, reporters favor the executive branch over Congress, and this bias extends to both Democratic and Republican presidents (DiMaggio 2015). This finding reflects the executive’s privilege over Congress in foreign affairs, tracing back more than half a century, which is also reinforced in other studies (Wildavsky 1975; Schlesinger 2004; Rudalevige 2005; Major 2014). Regarding domestic policy, I document bias favoring government more generally, and against nonofficial sources, in addition to bias in favor of market-​based, pro-​business ideology. The official-​source bias has long existed, and my research finds that representatives of citizens groups, lobbying firms, scholars, and other citizens appear far less often in political stories than officials (Herman and Chomsky 1988; Hallin 1989; Zaller and Chiu 1996; Mermin 1999; Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston 2007; Bennett 2016; DiMaggio 2017a; Major 2014). Furthermore, the official-​ source bias does not favor Democrats. Rather, coverage shifts depending on the composition of government. Professional reporters often see themselves as “objective,” refusing to advocate for ideological positions. Instead, they amplify official voices, and the nature of that amplification depends on which party controls government. When Republicans control Congress and the White House, journalists heavily favor Republican sources. When Democrats hold Congress

 

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and the White House, reporting favors them. And when control of government is divided, coverage focuses on both parties (DiMaggio 2017a). The official-​source bias does not mean it is impossible for “average” citizens to impact the news, just that it is difficult. Progressive social movements such as Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and the 2011 Wisconsin labor protests of Governor Scott Walker received sustained coverage, were positively depicted, and cultivated public support because of sympathetic coverage (DiMaggio 2019). Right-​wing populism, including the Tea Party and Trumpism, garnered sustained news attention and sympathetic coverage (White 2018). Public attention to reporting on the Tea Party produced greater support (DiMaggio 2011). While Trump has received highly critical news coverage, the notion that his “working class” supporters have serious grievances has proliferated throughout the media (DiMaggio 2019). These findings suggest that “cracks in the system” exist for savvy citizen activists to exploit. Finally, there is a pro-​business, or “hegemonic,” media bias. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci popularized the concept of “hegemony” in the early twentieth century, referring to the process whereby political, business, and cultural elites lead or guide the masses via indoctrination (Forgacs and Hobsbawm 2000). These leaders shape mass opinion in favor of market-​oriented agendas. Public opinion on economic matters is not simply a reflection of one’s economic position—​with wealthier Americans more likely to form more conservative self-​serving views favoring fewer taxes on the rich and fewer corporate regulations, and poorer Americans favoring welfare programs aiding the needy. Rather, the power of ideology is central to hegemonic theory, with individuals forming opinions via an ongoing socialization process, and with the media playing a dominant role. The hegemonic bias in the news is real. News outlets—​ themselves corporations—​consistently underreport on inequality and societal class divisions, blunting any critical class consciousness of the citizenry (DiMaggio 2017b). Furthermore, reporters play an indirect role in disseminating hegemonic views by privileging official sources at a time when both parties have moved to the right on economic issues. This rightward shift has contributed to the growth of business power and inequality (Hacker and Pierson 2005, 2011; George 2012). By granting the major parties near-​monopoly power over media discourse, journalists truncate reporting to fit business agendas. This is evident in sustained coverage of policy debates centering on corporate deregulation, the termination of welfare programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, attempted privatization of Medicare and Social Security, tax cuts for the wealthy, and market-​based health care reforms such as the Affordable Care Act. Reporters may not openly endorse these proposals, but they cover these

 



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debates at the expense of more progressive policy proposals, exhibiting a subtle bias favoring hegemonic positions.

Previous Research Within the broader right-​wing shift of US culture, and considering the growing influence of the conservative countersphere in American politics, right-​wing media play a significant role in impacting politics. As the tip of the spear in the push for hegemonic policies, Fox News seeks to cultivate public support for conservative political reforms. The early development of modern right-​wing media—​specifically in talk radio and print—​is traced back to the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (McPherson 2008; Bobbitt 2010; Major 2012; Hemmer 2016; Bauer 2018; Jurdem 2018). The modern conservative movement also increasingly relied upon an infrastructure of think tanks and other nonprofit groups to mainstream and normalize far right economic and political ideas, especially from the 1970s onward (Stahl 2016; see also DiBranco, this volume). The Right continued its ascendance into political prominence via the rise of talk radio and cable news in the 1990s and 2000s onward (Baum and Groeling 2008; Jamieson and Cappella 2008; Kerbel 2009; Baym 2010; Berry and Sobieraj 2011, 2016; Meagher 2012; Brock and Rabin-​Havt 2012; Jones 2012; Peck 2014; Rabin-​ Havt 2016; Cassino 2016). In short, right-​wing media have grown into a formidable force in modern times. There is scholarly disagreement about the effect, if any, right-​wing media have on public opinion. Despite claims from decades ago that the media had “minimal effects” on audiences (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944; Klapper 1960), evidence later emerged that media influence what political issues Americans think about (agenda setting:  see Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Iyengar 1991; Protess and McCombs 1991; Dearing and Rogers 1996; McCombs 2004), how they think about them (priming: see Gilliam and Iyengar 2000; Scheufele and Tewksbury 2007; Roskos-​Ewoldsen, Klinger, and Roskos-​Ewoldsen 2007), and what they believe (framing: see Bonn 2010; Aday 2010; Nacos, Bloch-​Elkon, and Shapiro 2011; DiMaggio 2015, 2017a). Some scholars present evidence that partisan media have significant effects, contributing to ideological polarization among their audiences (Pfau, Moy, and Holbert 1998; Hall and Cappella 2002; Barker 2002; Stroud 2007, 2010, 2011; Holbert, Garrett, and Gleason 2010; Goldman and Mutz 2011; Feldman 2011; Levendusky 2013; Gervais 2014; Cassino 2016). Scholars speak of the rise of a conservative “echo chamber” and “niche news” outlets on the left and right serving partisan audiences ( Jamieson and Cappella 2008; Stroud 2011). The emergence of the conservative

 

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countersphere was, and remains, vital to the reinforcement of right-​wing media echo chambers. Some scholars believe the primary role of right-​wing media is to reinforce pre-​ existing conservative biases among news audiences. Citizens possess “motivated reasoning,” and seek out political information that confirms their ideology, while resisting information challenging their worldview (Taber and Lodge 2006). Conservative media simply tell viewers what they want to hear and preach to the choir. Some claim that media fragmentation into entertainment, “objective” news, and partisan media choices means that audiences self-​ select into watching content with which they are already predisposed to agree (Prior 2007). Numerous studies question the notion that partisan media impact political beliefs and behavior ( Jones 1998; Bennett and Iyengar 2008, 2010; Dilliplane 2011; Knobloch-​Westerwick and Meng 2011; Knobloch-​Westerwick 2012; Arceneaux and Johnson 2013; Brundidge et  al. 2014; Wojcieszak et  al. 2016). In sum, scholars are not at all of one mind regarding the effects of partisan media (see Nadler and Bauer, this volume).

Research Design I contribute to this academic discussion of partisan media effects by adopting a longitudinal approach. I  analyze national public opinion data from the Pew Research Center from 2004 through 2016, including ten surveys measuring public consumption of partisan media outlets and public attitudes on politics.1 These polls probe Americans on their viewership of Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN. Using statistical “regression” analysis, I measure whether consumption of these outlets is associated with formation of conservative or liberal political attitudes.2 This differs from studies relying on lab-​based experimental methods in which participants are exposed to various “treatments” related to biased media content, to measure their effects on participants’ attitudes. While experimental studies are valuable in demonstrating “causality” between media consumption and attitude formation, they suffer from an external validity problem, in that it

  These surveys include the Pew Research Center’s surveys on media consumption of Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, which were undertaken in January 2004, December 2007, July 2009, March 2011, July 2011, January 2012, May 2012, May 2013, and July 2013. 2   In generating standardized coefficients to measure the impact of each independent variable on public attitudes, I utilize the Clarify statistical program, while undertaking ordered and binary logistic regression analyses. Binary logistic regression is used for answers with a simple “agree” or “disagree” option and other dichotomous variables. Ordered logistic regression is used for survey questions with four categories. 1

 



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is difficult, if not impossible, to generalize from these results without national survey data. Readers should be skeptical of claims that observed correlations between media consumption and political attitudes are evidence of a “cause and effect” process. It may be that Fox News viewers are more likely to be conservative, and to already hold right-​wing views, so that an association between media consumption and conservative political attitudes is due to viewers’ pre-​existing partisanship and ideology. I address this problem by “controlling” for these factors in my analysis, to uncover whether cable news consumption is associated with conservative attitude formation after accounting for potentially confounding factors such as ideological and partisan attachments. If a relationship between news consumption and political attitudes remains after adding these controls, it is unlikely to be due to audiences’ partisan or ideological biases.3 My analysis includes 171 questions, covering citizens’ political and media attitudes, broken down into four categories. These include public opinion of government and political leaders, opinions of bias within and trust/​distrust of the media, and opinions of domestic and foreign policy issues. I also utilize controls for other potentially confounding factors, including gender, age, education, race, and income. These controls increase my confidence in speaking about potential cause-​and-​effect relationships. Of course, this analysis also has limits. First, not every question I  analyze about public perceptions of the media and politics is asked in each of the surveys I examine between 2004 and 2016. It is typically the case that each question I examined (save Obama’s approval rating) was asked only once over this

  Scholars such as Arceneaux and Johnson (2013) argue that statistical regression analysis using national survey data is inappropriate for demonstrating causality between media consumption and attitude formation. They argue that other factors outside of partisanship and ideology may need to be controlled for to convincingly make the case for media effects. They are right to be concerned about any correlation in national survey data being interpreted as definitive “proof ” of causality. But there are also three major problems with their claim. First, Arceneaux and Johnson only use experimental data to measure partisan media impact on public opinions, and since the participants in these experiments are not representative of the nation, this method by itself is not appropriate for generalizing about the question of media effects. Second, the claim that other factors outside of partisanship and ideology may be playing a confounding role between media consumption and attitude formation in national surveys is weak. Without compelling evidence presented that this is actually the case, the “argument” suffers from a complete lack of empirical evidence. To take this claim more seriously, definitive evidence must be presented that there is a confounding variable at work between media consumption and political attitudes in national opinion surveys. Third, the criticism that other factors may be missing from a regression analysis is not novel. All statistical regression analyses that claim causality using national data are susceptible to the claim that variables could be missing from scholars’ models. This criticism, in the absence of definitive evidence that a variable is missing from one’s model, is not terribly compelling in discrediting regression analysis as a tool of causal inference. 3

 

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twelve-​year period. That means that my measurements—​for each individual survey question at least—​represent an analysis that occurs as a “snapshot in time.” Second, all the questions I analyze predate Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, meaning that the analysis cannot provide insights into press-​governmental relations, and the impact of news reporting on public opinion, during the Trump presidency. My analysis covers a period from the mid-​2000s to the mid-​2010s, when Fox News was consistently defined by its unabashed conservatism, while CNN failed to explicitly embrace any one partisan media bias, and MSNBC vacillated between a conservative pro–​Iraq War bias during the early Bush years to a more liberal bias—​at least for its nightly primetime lineup—​during the late 2000s through the 2010s. Future analyses will be needed to examine partisan media effects in the age of Trump’s presidency and beyond. My analysis provides some preliminary findings regarding the impact of Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC consumption on opinions of Trump but does not go much beyond that.

Findings It is too simplistic to say that only selective exposure is at work in partisan media consumption. Partisans gravitate to cable media outlets that fit their ideological predispositions, but this phenomenon is weaker than one might think. Contrary to the claims of media pundits in the conservative countersphere, there is little evidence of a liberal polarizing effect for CNN and MSNBC consumption on political attitudes. Rather, both selective exposure and polarization appear to be at work on the right, particularly in relation to Fox News consumption. The echo chamber concept, while conceptually powerful, lacks consistent empirical support. There is some evidence that ideologues self-​select into media outlets fitting their pre-​existing beliefs. This point is demonstrated in Figure 11.1, which is drawn from Pew’s July 2013 survey. Most consumers relying on Fox News as a primary media source were conservatives. However, most individuals relying on CNN or MSNBC as a primary source were moderates, not liberals. For CNN and MSNBC, there is little evidence that ideology drives media preferences. Figure 11.2 provides estimates of the relationships between partisanship, ideology, and cable news consumption, after controlling for other factors including respondents’ gender, age, education, race, and income. The measures provided are standardized on a scale from -​1 to 1, with a “-​1” indicating a perfect negative association between two factors, and “1” suggesting a perfect positive association between two factors. Neither party nor ideology is a significant predictor of CNN consumption. While both factors are significant predictors of MSNBC viewership, the relationships are weak. On the contrary, ideology and party are much stronger predictors of Fox News viewership, controlling for

 



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Media Consumption by Ideology (Jul. 2011) Liberal MSNBC

Moderate Conservative

% of each news outlet᾽s viewers fitting each ideological description

Liberal CNN

Moderate Conservative Liberal

Fox News

Moderate Conservative 0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

Figure 11.1  Media consumption by ideology. Echo Chambers? Predictors of Cable News Consumption (July 2011)

CNN Viewers

MSNBC Viewers

Fox Viewers

Ideology (Liberal)

1 = outlet is main source of one᾽s news information on TV

Party (Democratic)

0 = outlet is not the main source of one᾽s news information on TV

Ideology (Liberal)* Party (Democratic)*

Ideology (Conservative)*** Party (Republican)*** 0

0.5

1

Figure 11.2  Echo chambers? Predictors of cable news consumption. Controls: Party ID, ideology, income, gender, age, education, race. Significance levels: * = 5%; ** = 1%; *** = .1%.

respondents’ gender, age, education, race, and income. This evidence suggests that the “echo chamber” phenomenon, although real, largely applies to the Right. Scholars speak of a “hostile media effect,” with partisans viewing the media as biased against their own political beliefs (Beck 1991; Dalton, Beck, and

 

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Huckfeldt 1998; Smith 2010; Ladd 2011; Hansen and Kim 2011; Hartmann and Tanis 2013; Stroud et  al. 2014; Borah and Shah 2016). So conservatives would be more likely to think media are liberally biased, and liberals would see a conservative bias. One would expect these results from liberal and conservative echo chambers that socialize audiences to see the world in terms of “in groups” and “out groups.” But the hostile media effect is only partially confirmed here. Figure 11.3, drawing on Pew data from December 2007, reveals that distrust of mass media sources was concentrated among Fox News viewers, not CNN or MSNBC viewers. The relationships documented in Figure 11.3, as with all

Predictors of Attitudes Toward Various News Outlets (Dec. 2007) Ideology (Conservative) Party (Republican)*

New York Times

Fox Viewers**

Ideology (Conservative)* Party (Republican)***

Broadcast News

CNN Viewers MSNBC Viewers

Fox Viewers***

1 = favorable view of each news outlet –1 = unfavorable

CNN Viewers MSNBC Viewers

Ideology (Conservative)*** Party (Republican)***

CNN Viewers*** MSNBC Viewers

Fox Viewers***

Ideology (Conservative)* Party (Republican)***

MSNBC

CNN Viewers MSNBC

Fox Viewers***

CNN

Viewers

Ideology (Conservative)*** Fox News

–0.5

–0.4

–0.3

Party (Republican)***

CNN Viewers MSNBC Viewers –0.2

–0.1

Fox Viewers***

0

0.1

0.2

Figure 11.3  Predictors of attitudes toward various news outlets.

0.3

0.4

0.5

Controls: Party ID, ideology, Fox News consumption, MSNBC consumption, CNN consumption, income, gender, age, education, race. Significance levels: * = 5%; ** = 1%; *** = .1%.

 



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subsequent figures, persist after controlling for other factors, including respondents’ political party, ideology, gender, age, education, race, and income. Perceptions of media outlets as “liberal” enemies of the truth are common in right-​wing media outlets (see Lane and Major, this volume), and that distrust is apparent in Figure 11.3. Even after controlling for respondents’ partisanship and ideology, Fox News consumption was a significant predictor of unfavorable views toward media, including the New York Times, broadcast news outlets, CNN, and MSNBC. CNN consumption was not a significant predictor of views toward any outlets analyzed, with the exception (unsurprisingly) of attitudes toward CNN. MSNBC viewership was not a significant predictor of views for any of the outlets in question, including MSNBC. This suggests little partisan or ideological attachment from MSNBC viewers toward their preferred media source, at least in the 2000s. This may have changed in later years as MSNBC sought to expand its liberal audience by recruiting progressives to host their primetime lineup, although the data here does not allow me to test this possibility. Partly validating the hostile media effect hypothesis, Fox News viewers are more likely to see media as favoring Democrats and opposing Republicans. In Figure 11.4, Fox News viewership, political party, and ideology were the strongest predictors of the belief that the media favored Democrats in the early 2008 election coverage. CNN and MSNBC viewers were more likely to disagree that there was liberal bias in the news, although viewership of both outlets was much weaker than Fox News viewership in predicting attitudes about bias. This suggests a distinction between different types of media audiences. Fox News

Perceptions of Media Bias in Presidential Elections (Dec 2007) 1 = agree media were biased in favor of Democrats in election coverage

Age (Older) Gender (Men) Income (Higher)

–1 = disagree media were biased in favor of Democrats

MSNBC Viewers Race (White) CNN Viewers* Fox Viewers*** Education (Higher)*** Party (Republican)*** Ideology (Conservative)*** –0.15 –0.1 –0.05

0

0.05

0.1

0.15

0.2

0.25

0.3

Figure 11.4  Perceptions of media bias in presidential elections (December 2007).

0.35

Controls: Party ID, ideology, Fox News consumption, MSNBC consumption, CNN consumption, income, gender, age, education, race. Significance levels: * = 5%; ** = 1%; *** = .1%.

 

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Anthony DiMaggio The Right-Wing Echo Chamber: Media Consumption & Political Attitudes (2004–2013) 161 Questions (% of Questions in Which Consumption of Each Outlet Predicts Public Attitudes)

70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Fox News

MSNBC

CNN

Figure 11.5  The right-​wing echo chamber: media consumption and political attitudes.

Controls: Fox News consumption, MSNBC consumption, CNN consumption, party ID, ideology, income, gender, age, education, race.

viewers were unique, compared to CNN and MSNBC viewers, in their partisan and ideological backgrounds and perceptions of the media. Selective exposure and polarization effects are not mutually exclusive phenomena. They are simultaneously at work. Conservatives are more likely to gravitate to Fox News and distrust the media. And Fox News consumption appears to be driving polarization by pushing its audience to the right, although a comparable liberal polarization effect is not at work with CNN and MSNBC viewers. In testing the partisan media polarization hypothesis, I examined whether consumption of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News predicted political and media attitudes for 161 survey questions from 2004 through 2013. This is no small amount of time, nor is this a small number of attitudes. As suggested in Figure 11.5, the concept of media echo chambers is extraordinarily one-​sided in terms of the likely effects of consuming Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN. The figure documents how often consumption of each outlet significantly predicts liberal or conservative attitudes after controlling for political party, ideology, gender, age, education, race, and income. Fox News consumption is four times as frequent a predictor of attitudes as MSNBC consumption, and six times as frequent as CNN consumption. Neither CNN nor MSNBC is a regular predictor of liberal attitudes, which undermines the liberal media echo chamber hypothesis. Figure 11.5 provides a bird’s eye view of the likely impact of partisan media on citizens’ attitudes. I break these findings into four subgroups in Table 11.1. Again, one sees the infrequency of MSNBC and CNN consumption as predictors of liberal attitudes, with consumption of these two outlets failing to predict beliefs a majority of the time in all four categories. In contrast, Fox News is a

 



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Table 11.1  P  ower of Partisan Media Consumption in Predicting Public Opinion (2004–​2013): 161 Questions (Percentage of Questions in Which Consuming Each Outlet Predicts Public Attitudes) Fox News

MSNBC

CNN

Opinions Toward Political Leaders and Government (49 questions)

33%

10%

14%

Media Perceptions (39)

59%

8%

8%

Domestic Policy Attitudes (51)

80%

20%

14%

Foreign Policy Attitudes (22)

59%

18%

9%

Controls: Party ID, Ideology, Income, Gender, Age, Education, Race.

significant predictor of attitudes most of the time in three of the four categories. Only for opinions of political leaders and government does the outlet fail to predict attitudes in most cases. But at its most powerful, Fox News consumption predicts domestic policy attitudes an overwhelming 80 percent of the time. This may be because of the parochial nature of American political culture, with citizens disproportionately focused on events within US borders. Still, Fox News does regularly cover foreign policy–​related issues, and consumption of this outlet predicts foreign policy attitudes nearly 60 percent of the time. One question arising from these findings is whether Fox News consumption is a meaningful predictor of conservative attitudes. Maybe the outlet has a consistent but weak influence over viewers, limiting the usefulness of my findings. This, however, is not the case. Figure 11.6 provides comprehensive estimates for the predictive power of media consumption, partisanship, ideology, gender, age, education, and income, averaged across the 161 questions examined, after statistically controlling for every other factor included in the analysis. Age, gender, education, income, and race are not strong factors in predicting conservative and liberal attitudes. This is in part because these factors are often weak in their predictive power, and in part because their impact cuts in opposite ideological directions depending on the specific political question examined. These contrary effects average out, blunting any potential for a consistent liberal or conservative impact. As seen in Figure 11.6, partisanship, ideology, and media consumption are much stronger predictors of political beliefs. While Fox News is not as powerful

 

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Anthony DiMaggio Predictors of Conservative Political Opinions: (2004–2013) 161 Questions 1 = factor predicts attitudes in a conservative direction

Age (Older) Gender (Men) Education (Higher)

–1 = factor predicts attitudes in a liberal direction

Income (Higher) Race (White) Fox News Consumption Ideology (Conservative) Party ID (Republican) –0.1

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

Figure 11.6  Predictors of conservative political opinions.

Controls: Party ID, ideology, Fox News consumption, MSNBC consumption, CNN consumption, income, gender, age, education, race.

as ideology or partisanship, it is a stronger predictor than the other factors discussed previously. And the likely role of Fox News in polarizing its audiences is hardly insignificant. Political scientists, pundits, and intellectuals have long discussed the roles of age, gender, education, income, and race in shaping consciousness and politics. That Fox News consumption appears to exert such a meaningful impact on political attitudes speaks to its political significance. This does not mean that factors like race, income, education, age, or gender are insignificant to political attitude formation, as some might conclude from looking at Figure 11.6. Rather, it may simply be that these factors work indirectly to impact political attitudes by influencing which political party and ideology Americans gravitate toward, with partisanship and ideology then playing a direct role in impacting political and attitudes. Another question: has the power of Fox News viewership grown in recent years alongside the growth of the conservative countersphere in American news? Unfortunately, almost none of the political questions I examine were repeated word for word in Pew’s monthly surveys from 2004 to 2013. But one question did appear across numerous surveys—​President Barack Obama’s approval rating. Figure 11.7 documents the predictive power of numerous factors in influencing Obama’s approval. There is little evidence of a liberal impact for CNN consumption. Only in 2011 was CNN viewership significantly associated with Obama’s approval rating, and it was correlated with disapproval. MSNBC appeared to exert a growing impact on Obama’s rating. However, MSNBC viewership was only infrequently associated with liberal political attitudes in this chapter, suggesting it had a weak impact on polarizing audiences. Finally,

 



Slanting the  News

0.4

Predictors of Obama Job Approval (2009–2013) 1 = approve Obama –1 = disapprove

203

Fox News*** (2009, 2011, 2013) MSNBC* (2011, 2013)

0.2

CNN Consumption* (2011) Party (Republican)*** (2009, 2011, 2013)

0

Ideology (Conservative)*** (2009, 2011, 2013)

–0.2

Race (White)*** (2009, 2011, 2013)

–0.4 –0.6 –0.8

2009

2011

2013

Figure 11.7  Predictors of Obama job approval.

Controls: Party ID, ideology, Fox News consumption, MSNBC consumption, CNN consumption, income, gender, age, education, race. Significance levels: * = 5%; ** = 1%; *** = .1%.

Fox News consumption and race (being white), alongside Republican partisanship and conservative ideology, were strong negative predictors of Obama’s job approval.

Media Effects in the Age of Trump As of this writing (mid-​2018), the most recent Pew survey data for measuring partisan media consumption and its effects on public opinion extended only through the end of 2016. This means that I am only able to provide early, rudimentary conclusions about how cable media impact public opinion and media consumption during the Trump administration. In this section, I draw on an additional ten survey questions from Pew’s December 2016 national survey, which queried respondents on their immigration attitudes (eight questions) and their voting preferences (for Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump). Incorporating these items brings my total analysis up to 171 questions. On the issue of immigration, questions surveyed Americans on their opinions of accepting refugees from war-​torn countries, on increased deportations of unauthorized immigrants, on preventing unauthorized immigrants from receiving government welfare benefits, on finding ways to allow unauthorized immigrants to legally remain in the United States, on encouraging more

 

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highly skilled immigrants to come to the United States, on establishing stricter policies to prevent those who enter the country legally from overstaying their visas, on allowing unauthorized immigrants who entered the United States as children to remain and apply for legal status, and on opinions of building a wall between the United States and Mexico. Although these questions speak only to the immigration issue, the results are much the same as those found earlier in this chapter. The relationship between Fox News consumption and attitudes on immigration, after controlling for other factors including gender, age, education, race, income, political party, and ideology, is statistically significant for a majority—​five of eight—​ of the questions. In contrast, CNN consumption is not a significant predictor of immigration attitudes for any of the eight questions, and MSNBC consumption only predicts attitudes for one of eight questions. These findings mirror those from the previous 161 questions, in which Fox consumption impacted political attitudes most of the time, and CNN and MSNBC had little impact on beliefs. Additionally, I  examined whether the one-​ sided echo chamber phenomenon—​which applied mainly to Fox News instead of other cable news outlets in the early 2010s—​persisted in 2016. Figure 11.8 demonstrates that the findings from Figure 11.2 (from 2011)  are reinforced for 2016. Whether one measures media consumption based on individuals regularly consuming election news from each outlet or on individuals relying on each outlet as their main source of electoral information, the findings are not substantively different. The results suggest a much weaker echo chamber at work with allegedly “liberal” news outlets. The echo chamber effect is largely a right-​w ing development, with Republicans and conservatives being far more likely to rely on Fox News than liberals and Democrats were to rely on CNN or MSNBC. Evidence from the 2016 election survey also suggests that the impact of media on electoral preferences was similarly one-​sided. Figure 11.9 presents findings for the relationships between media consumption and other factors on Americans’ willingness to vote for Democratic and Republican presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. After controlling for respondents’ party affiliation, ideology, gender, age, education, income, and race, Fox News consumption was a weaker predictor of election preferences in comparison to ideology and party affiliation, but much stronger in predicting voting than age, race, gender, or income. As with previous findings, Fox News consumption was far stronger as a predictor of vote choice than was CNN or MSNBC viewership. I do not find these results to be surprising, considering they overlap with the pattern of media effects documented earlier in this chapter.

 

Echo Chambers? The 2016 Presidential Election (Dec. 2016) Fox News Party (Republican)***

Fox, main source of election info Regular Fox viewer during election

Ideology (Conservative)*** Party (Republican)*** Ideology (Conservative)***

MSNBC, main source of election info Regular MSNBC viewer during election

CNN, main source of election info Regular CNN viewer during election

MSNBC Party (Democratic)**

1 = relied on each news outlet for election information

Ideology (Liberal)*** Party (Democratic)** Ideology (Liberal)***

0 = did not rely on each news outlet for election information

CNN Party (Democratic) Ideology (Liberal) Party (Democratic)** Ideology (Liberal)* 0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

Figure 11.8  Echo chambers? The 2016 presidential election.

Controls: Party ID, ideology, Fox News consumption, MSNBC consumption, CNN consumption, income, gender, age, education, race. Significance levels: * = 5%; ** = 1%; *** = .1%.

Media Consumption and 2016 Voter Preferences (Dec. 2016) Income (Higher) 1 = support candidate

Gender (Men)* HRC Race (White)*** Trump*** HRC Age (Older)* HRC

–1 = do not support candidate

HRC Trump

MSNBC Viewership*** HRC CNN Viewership*** Trump*** HRC Fox News Viewership*** Trump*** HRC Education (Lower)*** Trump* HRC Ideology (Conservative)*** Trump*** HRC Party (Republican)*** Trump*** HRC –1

–0.8

–0.6

–0.4

–0.2

0

Figure 11.9  Media consumption and 2016 voter preferences.

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

Controls: Party ID, ideology, Fox News consumption, MSNBC consumption, CNN consumption, income, gender, age, education, race. Significance levels: * = 5%; ** = 1%; *** = .1%.

 

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Broader Significance In a recent empirical study, Martin and Yurukoglu (2017) concluded that Fox News became increasingly conservative in its media slant during the 2000s and 2010s. This change, they find, helps account for the outlet’s significant and growing impact on public opinion. The findings from this chapter strongly overlap with those from their study. They also reinforce the contention of this book that conservative news and the conservative countersphere in American political discourse are of vital significance. But the results from this chapter are hardly the last word on media bias. For one, this study only analyzed cable news outlets, while omitting talk radio and various openly biased online media outlets. Despite these limitations, my study can still tell us much about media bias and its effects. Fox News is the most watched of all cable news outlets, and the most pervasive and influential of all conservative media institutions. To document such consistent effects for Fox consumption speaks to the significant power of conservative pundits and media actors in popularizing the opinions and ideology of the American Right. My findings suggest that conservative media contribute significantly to the polarization of America, rather than simply reaffirming the pre-​existing beliefs and prejudices of the Republican political base. The findings here are important in another sense in that they provide a foundation for future empirical examination of partisan media effects. Will the patterns of media effects analyzed here—​which are heavily one-​sided and concentrated in favor of the American Right—​continue into the late 2010s and 2020s? How might partisan media effects change regarding media consumers’ political attitudes and the echo chamber phenomenon in the age of Trump? What about changes over time in media effects for other right-​wing media outlets outside of Fox News? My findings constitute a starting point for tracking media effects over time, but they are not the end of the story when it comes to addressing these questions. Additional studies will be necessary to better generalize about the impact of right-​wing media on mass political culture. My findings are also relevant because they cast serious doubt on popular and long-​standing conservative complaints about a pervasive and ominous effect of “liberally biased” media on the American public. The results from this chapter provide little evidence of an expansive or consistent impact for CNN or MSNBC consumption on public political attitudes over the last few decades. Most recently, Trump’s complaints about “liberal media” outlets undermining his presidency appear to be strongly exaggerated. It is certainly the case that consumption of CNN and MSNBC is associated with increasingly critical views of Trump, even after controlling for potentially confounding factors such as viewers’ partisanship and ideology. But the impact of news consumption for these

 



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two outlets is much weaker than the impact of Fox News on Trump attitudes. If conservatives are genuinely concerned with media bias perverting the minds of the body politic, such concerns, by any reasonable standard, should be greater for conservative outlets like Fox News, which appear to exert a far stronger impact on electoral preferences. Finally, there is the issue of informed media consumers to consider. Scholars have long focused on the importance of deliberation and engagement with different points of view for the strengthening of democracy (Habermas 1985; Gamson 1992; Putnam 2001; Perrin 2006; Mutz 2006; Jacobs, Cook, and Delli Carpini 2009; Klofstad 2011; Fishkin 2011; Gadaer 2013). If citizens are not informed of and engaging in competing points of view, how can they develop informed political opinions? Fox News appears to have a significant impact on political thought, curtailing serious consideration of alternative viewpoints. The rise of the right-​wing echo chamber means that many conservatives and Republicans are less likely to pay attention to nonconservative sources, and that millions of Americans engage less often with competing liberal viewpoints. The curtailment of public thought is driven by a party system (Campbell et al. 1980; Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2004; Lewis-​Beck et  al. 2008)  that socializes the citizenry by impacting individual beliefs and identities (Zaller 1992; Berinsky 2009; Lenz 2012). Some condemn this media system as propagandistic due to its heavy reliance on official views (Herman and Chomsky 1988; DiMaggio 2008, 2009; Steuter and Wills 2009; Bonn 2010; Nacos et al. 2011; Minnite 2012). Whether or not one accepts claims about media propaganda, we should be concerned with the negative effects of the right-​wing echo chamber. How are we to know if our political values are truly our own if we are systematically sheltered from considering alternative viewpoints? In the conservative media countersphere, selective exposure to right-​wing political views means that many news consumers are less likely to be exposed to alternative viewpoints. When political elites fuel a partisan media system that truncates information in favor of party agendas, the public’s ability to become informed is endangered. Unfortunately, the negative effects of the right-​wing echo chamber will continue so long as millions of Americans balkanize themselves within separate informational communities.

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Progress, June 20. https://​www.americanprogress.org/​issues/​general/​reports/​2007/​06/​ 20/​3087/​the-​structural-​imbalance-​of-​political-​talk-​radio/​. Hannity, Sean. 2002. Let Freedom Ring:  Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism. New York: HarperCollins. Hansen, Glenn J., and Hyunjung Kim. 2011. “Is the Media Biased Against Me? A Meta-​Analysis of the Hostile Media Effect Research.” Communication Research Reports 28 (2): 169–​179. Hartmann, Tilo, and Martin Tanis. 2013. “Examining the Hostile Media Effect as an Intergroup Phenomenon: The Role of Ingroup Identification and Status.” Journal of Communication 63 (3): 535–​555. Hemmer, Nicole. 2016. Messengers of the Right:  Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon. Holbert, Lance R., R. Kelly Garrett, and Laurel S. Gleason. 2010. “A New Era of Minimal Effects? A Response to Bennett and Iyengar.” Journal of Communication 60 (1): 15–​34. Iyengar, Shanto. 1991. Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Iyengar, Shanto, and Donald R. Kinder. 1987. News That Matters: Television and American Opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jacobs, Lawrence R., Fay Lomax Cook, and Michael X. Delli Carpini. 2009. Talking Together: Public Deliberation and Political Participation in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, and Joseph N. Cappella. 2008. Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. New York: Oxford University Press. Jones, David A. 1998. “Political Talk Radio: The Limbaugh Effect on Primary Voters.” Political Communication 15 (3): 367–​381. Jones, Jeffrey P. 2012. “Fox News and the Performance of Ideology.” Cinema Journal 51 (4): 178–​185. Jurdem, Laurence R. 2018. Paving the Way for Reagan: The Influence of Conservative Media on US Foreign Policy. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Kerbel, Matthew R. 2009. Netroots: Online Progressives and the Transformation of American Politics. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Klapper, Joseph T. 1960. The Effects of Mass Communication. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Klofstad, Casey. 2011. Civic Talk: Peers, Politics, and the Future of Democracy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Knobloch-​Westerwick, Silvia. 2012. “Selective Exposure and Reinforcement of Attitudes and Partisanship Before a Presidential Election.” Journal of Communication 62 (4): 628–​642. Knobloch-​Westerwick, Silvia, and Jingbo Meng. 2011. “Reinforcement of the Political Self Through Selective Exposure to Political Messages.” Journal of Communication 61 (2): 349–​368. Kuypers, Jim A. 2002. Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues. Westport, CT: Praeger. Ladd, Jonathan M. 2011. Why Americans Hate the Media and How it Matters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Bernard R. Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet. 1944. The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. New York: Columbia University Press. Lenz, Gabriel S. 2012. Follow the Leader: How Voters Respond to Politicians’ Policies and Performance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levendusky, Matthew. 2013. How Partisan Media Polarize America. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Lewis-​Beck, Michael S., Helmut Norpoth, William G. Jacoby, and Herbert F. Weisberg. 2008. The American Voter Revisited. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lowry, Dennis T. 2008. “Network TV News Framing of Good vs Bad Economic News Under Democratic and Republican Presidents: A Lexical Analysis of Political Bias.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 85 (3): 483–​498.

 



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Major, Mark. 2012. “Objective but Not Impartial:  Human Events, Barry Goldwater, and the Development of the ‘Liberal Media’ in the Conservative Countersphere.” New Political Science 34 (4): 455–​468. Major, Mark. 2014. The Unilateral Presidency:  The Politics of Framing Executive Power. New York: Palgrave. Martin, Gregory J., and Ali Yurukoglu. 2017. “Bias in Cable News: Persuasion and Polarization.” American Economic Review 107 (9): 2565–​2599. McCombs, Maxwell. 2004. Setting the Agenda:  The Mass Media and Public Opinion. Cambridge: Polity. McPherson, James Brian. 2008. The Conservative Resurgence and the Press: The Media’s Role in the Rise of the Right. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Meagher, Richard. 2012. “The ‘Vast Right-​Wing Conspiracy’: Media and Conservative Networks.” New Political Science 34 (4): 469–​484. Mermin, Jonathan. 1999. Debating War and Peace: Media Coverage of U.S. Intervention in the Post-​ Vietnam Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Minnite, Lorraine C. 2012. “New Challenges in the Study of Right-​Wing Propaganda: Priming the Populist Backlash to ‘Hope and Change.’” New Political Science 34 (4): 506–​526. Mutz, Diana. 2006. Hearing the Other Side:  Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nacos, Brigitte L., Yaeli Bloch-​Elkon, and Robert Y. Shapiro. 2011. Selling Fear: Counterterrorism, the Media, and Public Opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peck, Reece. 2014. “‘You Say Rich, I  Say Job Creator’:  How Fox News Framed the Great Recession Through the Moral Discourse of Producerism.” Media, Culture, and Society 36 (4): 526–​535. Perrin, Andrew J. 2006. Citizen Speak:  The Democratic Imagination in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pfau, Michael, Patricia Moy, and R. Lance Holbert. 1998. “The Influence of Political Talk Radio on Confidence in Democratic Institutions.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 75 (4): 730–​745. Prior, Markus. 2007. Post-​Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Protess, David L., and Maxwell McCombs, eds. 1991. Agenda Setting: Readings on Media, Public Opinion, and Policymaking. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Putnam, Robert D. 2001. Bowling Alone:  The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Touchstone Books. Rabin-​Havt, Ari. 2016. Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-​Truth Politics. Washington, DC: Media Matters for America. Roskos-​Ewoldsen, David R., Mark R. Klinger, and Beverly Roskos-​Ewoldsen. 2007. “Media Priming.” In Mass Media Effects Research:  Advances Through Meta-​ Analysis, edited by Raymond W. Preiss, Barbara Mae Gayle, Nancy Burrell, Mike Allen, and Jennings Bryant, 53–​80. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Rudalevige, Andrew. 2005. The New Imperial Presidency:  Renewing Presidential Power after Watergate. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Samuels, Brett. 2017. “Fox News to End 2017 as Most-​Watched Network on Cable.” The Hill, December 27. http://​thehill.com/​homenews/​media/​366637-​fox-​news-​to-​end-​2017-​ as-​most-​watched-​network-​on-​cable. Scheufele, Dietram A., and David Tewksbury. 2007. “Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models.” Journal of Communication 57 (1): 9–​20. Schiffer, Adam J. 2006. “Assessing Partisan Bias in Political News: The Case(s) of Local Senate Election Coverage,” Political Communication 23 (1): 23–​39. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. 2004. The Imperial Presidency. Orlando, FL: Mariner Books. Smith, Glen R. 2010. “Politicians and the News Media: How Elite Attacks Influence Perceptions of Media Bias.” International Journal of Press/​Politics 15 (3): 319–​343.

 

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Stahl, Jason. 2016. Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture Since 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Steuter, Erin, and Deborah Wills. 2009. At War with Metaphor: Media Propaganda and Racism in the War on Terror. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Stroud, Natalie J. 2007. “Media Effects, Selective Exposure, and Fahrenheit 9/​11.” Political Communication 24 (4): 415–​432. Stroud, Natalie J. 2010. “Polarization and Partisan Selective Exposure.” Journal of Communication 60 (3): 556–​576. Stroud, Natalie J. 2011. Niche News: The Politics of News Choice. New York: Oxford University Press. Stroud, Natalie J., Ashley Muddiman, and Jae Kook Lee. 2014. “Seeing Media as Group Members: An Evaluation of Partisan Bias” Journal of Communication 64 (5): 874–​894. Swift, Art. 2017. “Six in 10 in U.S. See Partisan Bias in News Media.” Gallup, April 5. http://​news. gallup.com/​poll/​207794/​six-​partisan-​bias-​news-​media.aspx. Taber, Charles S., and Milton Lodge. 2006. “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs.” American Journal of Political Science 50 (3): 755–​769. Theberge, Leonard J. 1981. “Crooks, Conmen, and Clowns.” Time, April 27. http://​www.time. com/​time/​magazine/​article/​0,9171,924721,00.html. Thomas, Sari, and Steven V. LeShay. 1992. “Bad Business? A  Reexamination of Television’s Portrayal of Businesspersons.” Journal of Communication 42 (1): 95–​105. White, Khadijah Costley. 2018. The Branding of Right-​Wing Activism: The News Media and the Tea Party. New York: Oxford University Press. Wildavsky, Aaron. 1975. “The Two Presidencies.” In Perspectives on the Presidency, edited by Aaron Wildavsky, 448–​461. New York: Little Brown and Co. Wojcieszak, Magdalena, Bruce Bimber, Lauren Feldman, and Natalie J. Stroud. 2016. “Partisan News and Political Participation: Exploring Mediated Relationships.” Political Communication 33 (2): 241–​260. Zaller, John R. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Zaller, John R., and Dennis Chiu. 1996. “Government’s Little Helper:  U.S. Press Coverage of Foreign Policy Crises, 1945–​1991.” Political Communication 14 (4): 385–​405.

 

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Bridging the Marginal and the Mainstream Methodological Considerations for Conservative News as a Subfield Mark Major

In this chapter, I  make the following interrelated arguments.1 First, conservative news deserves to be a subfield of political communication and media studies. Second, and related to the first, scholars of conservative news need to create more linked spaces to communicate our collective ideas, narratives, and scholarly findings. Creating a communal environment will lead to my third argument in this chapter: scholars of conservative news need to develop a common language and analytical approach to this area of inquiry. More specifically, I advocate for referring to right-​wing mediums collectively as the “conservative countersphere.” In addition, I contend that three interactive factors are fundamental to the study of conservative news and cultures. The chapter argues for the role of institutions, ideas, and actors as central to the study of what I call the conservative countersphere. I advocate for applying the framework of “discursive institutionalism” as an analytical approach to conservative news. Discursive institutionalism gives primacy to the role of ideas, actors, and discourses in an institutional context. I think this is a productive way to connect scholars of conservative news across a variety of disciplines. Finally, I hope to demonstrate the value of discursive institutionalism through a brief discussion of the emergence, crystallization, and promotion of the idea of the “liberal media” in conservative media and discourse. This chapter explores the analytical potential of discursive institutionalism through the examination of coordinative (i.e., conservatives talking about the press among themselves in the conservative countersphere)   Sections of this chapter rely on material from Major (2012, 2015).

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and communicative (i.e., conservatives making their case about the “liberal media” to the larger public) discourses in the development and popularization of this idea.

Conservative Media as a Subfield Conservative media is a unique area of inquiry in the fields of political communication, journalism, and media studies. It is well established that conservative news has made a substantive impact on modern American political development. For example, the consolidation of power by the ultra-​Right of the Republican Party would not have been possible without mediums of conservatism like talk radio and Fox News (Berry and Sobieraj 2014). The same cannot be said for liberal news in the United States. It seems unfathomable to imagine President Obama talking to Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation or Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks on a weekly basis like the way President Trump seeks out advice from Rupert Murdoch or, especially, Sean Hannity of Fox News. In fact, conservative news has developed into a political and cultural medium that demands its own subfield. The question, then, is why is it not one already. While the scholarship on American conservatism has been definitely lifted out of the orphan status that Brinkley (1994) characterized as the state of the field more than twenty years ago, scholarship on right-​wing media leaves much to be desired. As Phillip-​Fein (2011) notes in a more recent assessment of the state of the field on history and conservatism, there is much work to be done on the role of the media in the conservative movement (735). Despite the formidable power of right-​wing news, scholarship on conservative media is, at best, a sketchy patchwork of ideas, approaches, and theories (see Nadler and Bauer, this volume). Scholars rarely talk to each other as members of a cohesive subfield. The lack of a sustained conversation denies the possibility of understanding and building on each other’s scholarship, challenging assumptions, and crafting a connected subfield of inquiry. Part of the problem is that scholars of conservative news, as this volume attests, span multiple academic disciplines from political science to comparative literature. In addition, while conservative news outlets have been prominent in “new media” scholarship (see Berry and Sobieraj 2014; Jamieson and Cappella 2008; Faris et  al. 2017), they were also pivotal to movement conservatism long before cable news, talk radio, and social media (see Bauer 2018; Greenberg 2008; Hemmer 2016; Hendershot 2011; Major 2012, 2015; McPherson 2008). Scholars of conservative news need to talk to each other. Edited volumes like this one serve as a valuable step in that direction. Another fruitful step is developing a common language and analytical approach. Think for a minute about all

 



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of the different issues, concepts, disciplines, and methods that right-​wing news encompasses. Social movements, media effects, political participation, legacy and new media, political history, selective exposure, public opinion, American political development, partisanship, critical theory, political culture, new institutionalism, and the American presidency, among others, all are applicable issues to conservative news. Thus, while mediums of conservatism compel scholars to take an interdisciplinary approach, a common language and analytical framework would help avoid talking past each other. One modest proposal is to refer to right-​wing news as the “conservative countersphere.”

Conservatism, Public Spheres, and the “Conservative Countersphere” Value and rationality aside, conservative news is part of the dynamic realm of what critical theorist Jürgen Habermas calls the “public sphere.” The media more broadly is foundational to it. Nancy Fraser (1992) asserts that a multiplicity of public spheres—​institutionalized arenas of discursive interactions—​exist rather than a monolithic one as originally conceptualized by Habermas.2 Due to the exclusionary nature of white patriarchy and other hierarchical social structures, counterpublics form as venues for marginalized groups to interact within their community. Fraser refers to these alternative spheres as “subaltern counterpublics,” which are “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, so as to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (123). Despite Habermas implying to the contrary, Fraser (1992) contends that the proliferation of counterpublics represents a substantive advancement in democratic development as it better promotes “the ideal of participatory parity” (122). These subspheres are also spaces for identity construction (125, 140n.24). As Fraser explains it, “participation is not simply a matter of being able to state propositional contents that are neutral with respect to form of expression. . . . [P]‌articipation means being able to speak ‘in one’s own voice,’ thereby simultaneously constructing and expressing one’s cultural identity through idiom and style” (125–​126). In other words, these communicative spheres operate in “culturally specific institutions” that accommodate certain modes of expression while discouraging others (126). As Warner (2002) points out, counterpublics are “structured by different dispositions or protocols,” which informs the assumptions and norms embedded in all discourses (86).   On the nature and contours of publics, see Warner (2002).

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Though these “subaltern counterpublics stand in a contestatory relationship to dominant publics,” there is an interactive component that serves as a bridge between discursive spaces (Fraser 1992, 128). As Fraser puts it, “to interact discursively as a member of a public—​subaltern or otherwise—​is to attempt to disseminate one’s discourse into ever-​widening arenas” (124). It was through subaltern counterpublics that feminists, for example, were able to construct narratives to describe their subjugated lived experiences and develop terms like “date rape,” “sexism,” and “sexual harassment” and then introduce and promote those terms in broader public discursive spheres (123). While Fraser employs the term “subaltern counterpublic” to describe those marginalized from the dominant public sphere, I do not consider the right-​wing sphere to be a subaltern counterpublic because conservatives, despite their frequent claims to the contrary, are not a marginalized or subordinated group.3 As President Trump demonstrates on a daily basis, conservatives are often privileged insiders masquerading as aggrieved outsiders (Robin 2018).4 “Countersphere” is a more fitting designation for this type of discursive space since it is reactionary to the political order from a privileged group. More crucially, “countersphere” puts emphasis on the built media infrastructure that connects adherents of conservatism compared to the term “counterpublic.” Thus, “conservative countersphere” is the appropriate description for right-​wing news.5 The conservative countersphere enjoys similar features as subaltern counterpublics. It functions as a space of “withdrawal and regroupment” in that it provides a safe space for the Right to talk among themselves to formulate ideas, strategies, and narratives (Fraser 1992, 124). The conservative countersphere, like subaltern counterpublics, also serves as a space for identity formation. As historian Rick Perlstein (2008) describes movement conservatives of the postwar period: “They were a tribe, with their own rituals, kinship, structures, origin myths, priests,” with members of the conservative countersphere like William Buckley and William Rusher of National Review foremost among them (130). The conservative countersphere, again, like subaltern counterpublics, also functions as “bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics” (Fraser 1992, 124; e.g., see DiBranco and Bebout, this volume). The objective is to reshape the dominant public philosophy and discursive spheres. The conservative countersphere provided space for the Right to construct, among other narratives, a discourse that the establishment media holds 3   In addition, Warner (2002) has shifted the way some scholars use “counterpublic” away from one reserved only for objectively marginalized populations. 4   Of course, not all consumers of the conservative countersphere are privileged insiders. Consider, for example, the “Wal-​Mart moms” in Bethany Moreton’s (2010) work. 5   Also, who doesn’t love an alliterative term?

 



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a liberal bias that is hostile to conservatism (see Lane, this volume) and then eventually disseminate those discourses in wider public spheres. The conservative countersphere has distinctive features compared to subaltern counterpublics. A unique characteristic of the conservative countersphere is that it operates in a contradictory space. As a privileged group, conservatives take their discourse for granted as they assume the universality and normalcy of their claims, similar to dominant publics (see Warner 2002). Moreover, whereas counterpublics maintain “an awareness of its subordinate status” (Warner 2002, 86), the conservative countersphere assumes a subordinate status as conservatives are aroused by a sense of loss (Robin 2018; Bebout, this volume). It is helpful to view the conservative countersphere as operating not below but parallel to dominant discursive spheres. News outlets like Human Events, Fox News, National Review, American Opinion, the Weekly Standard, the op-​ed section of the Wall Street Journal, many newspapers of the former Confederacy, book publishers like Regnery and Devin-​ Adair, and broadcasters such as Clarence Manion, Dan Smoot, H. L. Hunt, and Billy James Hargis, as well as the more successful (and recent) iteration of radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Sean Hannity, among many others, help form the contours of this discursive institution that I call the conservative countersphere. Most, if not all, of the issues and mediums explored in this edited volume would identify as part of the conservative countersphere. This is not like reading Parade Magazine or Horse & Hound. Consuming outlets of the conservative countersphere is more agency oriented because it implies political action and partisanship. As DiMaggio shows in his chapter in this volume, conservative viewers come to Fox News already sold. They are already members of the tribe. They seek out outlets like Fox, Rush Limbaugh, or National Review because they are looking for “facts” and “ammunition” to reinforce their political predispositions, as Berry and Sobieraj (2014) found in their interviews with consumers of political opinion media.

Discursive Institutionalism We need to situate the conservative countersphere within a specific context. Fundamental to this concept is discourse. A  growing chorus of scholars have been pushing for taking ideas and discourses seriously (Carstensen and Schmidt 2016; Schmidt 2008, 2010, 2011, 2016; Blyth, Helgadottir, and Kring 2016; Kulawik 2009). Ideas and discourse are worthy of empirical analysis in their own right. To policymakers and politicians, as political scientist Vivien Schmidt (2008) argues, “the very notion that one would need to make a plea for taking ideas and discourse seriously would appear ludicrous, because the very essence

 

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of what they do is to generate ideas about what should be done and then communicate them to the general public for discussion and deliberation” (305). It is essential, though, to situate ideas and discourses in an institutional context. In fact, it is embedded in definitions of the public sphere. For example, Fraser (1992) defines public sphere as “an institutionalized arena of discursive interaction” (2). This allows us to track discourses operating in specific spheres and, more crucially, invites comparative analysis of conservative discourses operating in different spheres. Fraser’s theoretical construct of public spheres fits nicely with the analytical approach of “discursive institutionalism,” formulated most thoroughly by Vivien Schmidt (2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2016). Discursive institutionalism serves as an umbrella term for an analytical framework that takes seriously the ideas and narratives constructed by actors as well as the dynamic routes of discourse in institutional contexts.6 Discursive institutionalism goes beyond approaches like discourse analysis as it “encompasses not only the substantive content of ideas but also the interactive processes by which ideas are conveyed” (Schmidt 2008, 305). Discursive institutionalism seeks to understand and explain when, where, why, and how ideas and discourse matter (Schmidt 2008, 305). According to Schmidt (2008), the emphasis on discourse explicitly addresses “the representation of ideas (how agents say what they are thinking of doing) and the discursive interactions through which actors generate and communicate ideas (to whom they say it) within given institutional contexts (where and when they say it)” (306). That all discourse is embedded in institutional contexts is a starting point for discursive institutionalists. Broadly defined, there are two arenas of discourse: coordinative and communicative. “Coordinative discourse” involves communication among like-​minded actors, whereas “communicative discourse” is oriented toward broader publics (Schmidt 2008, 310). The first arena is the policy sphere of coordinative discourse. In this realm, actors—​groups or individuals—​“are involved in the creation, elaboration, and justification of policy and programmatic ideas” and “seek to coordinate agreement among themselves on policy ideas” (310). The second discursive space is the political sphere of communicative discourse. These political actors are “involved in the presentation, deliberation, and legitimation of political ideas to the general public” (310). Similar to Fraser’s conception about subaltern counterpublics disseminating messages in wider public spaces, the coordinative discursive sphere informs the advocacy and contestation in the   By using discursive institutionalism as an umbrella term, Schmidt (2012) leaves open where scholars may fit on the continuum between positivist and constructivist, including interpretivist, approaches. In other words, discursive institutionalism should be considered an inclusive analytical framework for scholars of various ontological, epistemological, and methodological persuasions. 6

 



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sphere of communicative discourse. According to Schmidt (2010), “communicative discourse encompasses the wide range of political actors who bring the ideas developed in the context of the coordinative discourse to the public for deliberation and legitimation” (3).7 I will use the origins, crystallization, and promotion of the idea of the liberal media in conservative discourse as a way to demonstrate the value of discursive institutionalism. I  argue that “coordinative discourse” occurs in the conservative countersphere as right-​wing partisans developed the narrative that the mainstream media has an inherent liberal bias that is antagonistic to movement conservatism. Once the notion of the liberal media is solidified in conservative thought and discourse, right-​wing activists and politicians make their case through “communicative discourse” of concept legitimation in broader public spaces like the New  York Times, CNN, and campaigns and elections. Understanding the evolution of a conservative disposition toward the establishment press requires an institutional focus. Applying discursive institutionalism as a conceptual lens allows us to sequence the evolution of the liberal media critique both in and outside of the conservative countersphere. It allows us to pay attention to processes developing over time. Once the idea of the liberal media becomes an article of faith for conservatives, it becomes a path-​dependent, locked-​in notion for the Right.

Coordinative Discourse in the Conservative Countersphere Most scholarship on conservative news has focused largely on the current right-​ wing media landscape (see Jamieson and Cappella 2008; Berry and Sobieraj 2014; Faris et al. 2017). Berry and Sobieraj (2014), for example, in their study of partisan media find that conservatives distrust the establishment press at higher rates than liberals, right-​wing outlets have higher tendencies for outrage and hostility toward the mainstream media, and this rage is more mature and abundant compared to liberal outlets. Yet, it is too easy to assume that public loathing toward the mainstream media has always been part of the conservative tradition. This is demonstrably false. Recent scholarship fails to inquire about the origins of this anger toward the establishment press because the idea of the “liberal media” was not always part of conservative or conventional wisdom. From the 1930s through the 1960s, for example, the majority of Americans,

  To link this back to Fraser (1992), coordinative discourse operates largely at the level of a “subaltern counterpublic,” whereas communicative discourse is found in wider public spheres. 7

 

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including an overwhelming majority of Republicans, believed the news to be fair and balanced (and not in the Fox News kind of way). In fact, for those who believed the press was biased, the majority of them felt it favored the Republican Party and skewed against New Deal Democrats (Ladd 2012; Lebovic 2017). Furthermore, the country’s top hundred newspapers endorsed the Republican candidate for the presidency 77 percent of the time in elections between 1940 and 1960 (Perlstein 2001, 426). It is my contention that the conservative countersphere is the key to understanding why the Right’s view of the press changed during this important period in American political development. We will rely on the conservative newsweekly Human Events to track the term “liberal media” in conservative discourse. Human Events serves as a reliable indicator of the type of coverage we should expect to find in the wider conservative countersphere because this newsweekly reprinted many items from other outlets of the Right. Human Events exposed its readers to the writings of many leading conservative thinkers, activists, and politicians including Herbert Hoover, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, William Buckley, Ayn Rand, Whittaker Chambers, Paul Harvey, M. Stanton Evans, Edith Efron, Russell Kirk, William Workman, Victor Lasky, Fulton Lewis Jr., James Kilpatrick, and Ludwig von Mises. Human Events also had extensive ties with other outlets in the conservative countersphere including Buckley’s National Review, John Birch Society’s American Opinion, and right-​wing broadcaster Charles Manion. As Figure 12.1 demonstrates, “liberal media/​press” becomes a frequently used term in Human Events by the 1960s. In fact, by 1966 it becomes a consistent term in the Human

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Human Events use of the term “liberal media/press” 1950–1989

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1950–1959

1960–1969

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1980–1989

Figure 12.1  Human Events’ use of the term “liberal media/​press,” 1950–​1989.

Note: Using the search terms “liberal media” and “liberal press,” Human Events items were accessed through the ProQuest database. I included “liberal press” because the term “media” was not part of mainstream discourse during the 1950s and early 1960s (before television emerged as a mass commodity). Any references to foreign media outlets like the United Kingdom’s liberal press were excluded from the count. Please note that not all of the issues in the Human Events archive are available before 1955. The majority of the issues become available around the mid-​1950s. Regardless, “liberal press/​media” was not a frequently used term in conservative circles during the 1950s.

 



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Events lexicon. This means that the construction and crystallization of the idea develops prior to the mid-​1960s.

Racial Resentment, Anti-​Communism, and the Emergence of the “Liberal Media” Untangling the origins of the liberal media critique is as difficult as pinpointing the precise reason for the emergence of the conservative movement in postwar America (Zelizer 2010). Conservatives tended to view all apparatuses of social, cultural, and political power in the United States, including the press, under the jackboot of liberalism, as Lane (this volume) demonstrates. This is, ultimately, the origin of the liberal media critique. However, two, interrelated issues—​ racism and anti-​communism—​help explain why the idea of the liberal media gained traction in the conservative movement. Moreover, anti-​communism and the backlash against the Black freedom movement helped bond the fragmented factions of conservatism (see Zelizer 2010 for a review).8 Though it is not the only causal factor, racial resentment is one of the primary animating spirits informing American conservatism (Lowndes 2008). Historian and journalism scholar David Greenberg (2008) locates the roots of the liberal media bias emerging from white Southerners’ reactionary hatred to press coverage of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Southern conservatives were displeased that the national press were putting a spotlight on the brutality that African Americans were subjected to in the Jim Crow South. Greenberg argues that the white Southerners found national media coverage to be heavily biased in favor of the civil rights movement. In their view, this was a product of the establishment press being entrenched in the Yankee Northeast. Conservatives like Senator Olin Johnson of South Carolina took offense to “the Northern liberal press . . . stirring up racial strife” in the South. The New York Times was not the paper of record for Southerners but rather a “racial amalgamation propaganda sheet” for its coverage of civil rights. The rise of television as a mass commodity added a visual and visceral layer to this coverage. “When segregationists realized that television was disrupting the system,” argues communication scholar Rodger Streitmatter (2008), “they began to view reporters as outside agitators—​and enemies” (176). As a result, members of the press (regardless of whether they were print or television reporters)   Due to length constraints, this section will focus primarily on the racial resentment aspect of the emergence of the liberal media critique. To be clear, it is not to discount the importance of anti-​ communist sentiment that motivated many conservatives. On the role that anti-​communism played in the conservative movement, see McGirr (2001). 8

 

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were subject to intimidation, violence, and, for French reporter Paul Guihard, death (Greenberg 2008, 177). During this period, CBS reporter Dan Rather recalled seeing a motel sign in Mississippi stating: “NO DOGS, NIGGERS OR REPORTERS ALLOWED” (Streitmatter 2008, 176). Emmett Till was fourteen years old when he was brutally tortured and murdered by two white supremacists in Mississippi in 1955. The two men, whom later admitted to killing Till, were tried and found innocent by an all-​white, male jury. Many white Southerners perceived national press interest in the Till case as, according to communication scholars Davis Houck and Matthew Grindy (2008), “merely pretext and proxy for an attack on the South’s way of life” (63). Southerners detested the hypocrisy of the mainstream press for not documenting their own race-​related disputes back home in New York and Washington, DC (Greenberg 2008, 176–​177). An editorial in the Mississippi Greenwood Commonwealth could not believe that “the great northern press has roared its contempt and scorn” for the murder of Emmett Till while they act as if “vile and filthy crimes” are “unknown to their section of the country” (Houck and Grindy 2008, 62). The “national outrage” is due to “the cockeyed slanted view of the Washington press” according to one letter to the editor in the Greenwood Morning Star (68). One Morning Star editorial denounced the “vicious propaganda” of the Northern “radical newsmen” (107). “Mr. Northern Agitator,” as one local Mississippi newspaper described the national press, was only interested in the Till case because they “wanted to sell a few extra papers” (62–​63). It was not just newspapers of the former Confederacy in which white supremacy received primacy, but also in the conservative countersphere. Rather than seeing it as exceptional, the South’s racial animosity was a microcosm of the entire country (Zelizer 2010, 368–​369). National Review—​headquartered in the Yankee Northeast and long considered the intellectual vanguard of “respectable” conservatism—​ran an editorial by William Buckley in 1957 proclaiming the racial superiority of whites. Buckley asserted that Blacks were the inferior race and the only resolution was seemingly benevolent white paternalism to uphold the political order, even without a popular mandate. Of course, one editorial is not indicative of the entire spectrum of conservative thought at the time.9 Buckley’s brother-​in-​law and conservative leader, Brent Bozell Jr., for instance, responded two weeks later with an item in National Review denouncing Buckley’s editorial as misguided. It is telling, though, about the type of commentators the conservative countersphere relied on to understand the racial politics of the era. Human Events, National Review, and American Opinion—​the leading publications in the

  If this were a conversation on social media, someone by now would have responded with #NotAllConservatives. 9

 



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conservative countersphere during this period—​did not seek out the analysis or commentary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, family members of the slain Emmett Till, or members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), or other civil rights groups. Instead, as Greene (this volume) documents, the conservative countersphere relied on the retrograde views of media figures like James Kilpatrick. James Kilpatrick, a Virginian segregationist and journalist, enjoyed extensive ties to the conservative countersphere (Hustwit 2011, 649). Human Events, along with other conservative outlets like National Review, would look to Kilpatrick for perspectives on civil rights and racial integration. For Kilpatrick, Brown v. Board—​the Supreme Court opinion striking down segregation in public schools—​was “a revolutionary act by a judicial junta which simply seized power, and thus far has managed to get away with its act of usurpation” (647). Kilpatrick denounced the Warren Court for its “rape of the Constitution” (647). Many conservative media activists endorsed Kilpatrick’s call for “interposition” or states’ prerogative to nullify federal laws. In the case of Emmett Till, the real miscarriage of justice was not his unaccountable torture and killing, according to Mississippi’s Natchez Democrat, but rather the Brown v. Board ruling because it “subverted the very foundations of our judicial decision” and “strayed far from Constitutional law and sought to appease the rising tide of sociological and political opinion” (Houck and Grindy 2008, 110). In addition, Kilpatrick helped steer conservatives in a new direction during the late 1950s and early 1960s by espousing racist creeds without relying on explicitly racist discourse. Kilpatrick “wrote about states’ rights, strict constitutionalism, individual freedom, and anti-​egalitarianism, but behind it all stood race” (Hustwit 2011, 639). A muscular anti-​communism was linked to this discourse too (Greenberg 2008; Miller 2015; Major 2012). Framing the press as a hypocritical outside agitator and a pro–​civil rights/​communist agent became a routine part of the discourse in the conservative countersphere. Southern conservatives denounced the “paper curtain”—​a reference to Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech—​that shrouded its readers from being exposed to their own racial problems in the Northeast. As the infamous Bull Connor put it, “The trouble with this country is communism, socialism, and journalism” (Greenberg 2008, 176). Communist subversion was always lingering in the minds of conservatives, though race usually informed it. A Mississippi Clarion-​Ledger editorial stated that “Our Northern brethren of the Fourth Estate are due for some serious soul-​searching for their misrepresentations” of the Emmett Till case. The ultimate tragedy is that the Northern press’s dishonesty lent “another lie to the Communist line of the Big Lie” (Houck and Grindy 2008, 123).

 

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“In their assaults on integration and the civil rights movement,” argues historian Edward Miller (2015), conservatives “eventually displaced Jim Crow racism with an antistatist, Cold War anti-​Communist discourse.” The new supposed color-​blind rhetoric “proved advantageous not only because it allowed a defense against charges of racism but because it ultimately fastened the southern white cause to a broader conservative program” (76). Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona served as a vital bridge between the South and the conservative movement. Moreover, he facilitated the liberal media critique moving from the margins to the mainstream of conservatism.

The “Liberal Media” as an Article of Faith Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy for the presidency breathed new life into the postwar conservative movement. William Rusher, publisher of National Review, considered Goldwater “the mid-​wife of modern conservatism” (McGirr 2001, 132). With Goldwater as their candidate, the Right succeeded in nominating a conservative’s conservative. This was an all-​hands-​on-​deck moment for conservatives as evidenced by Rusher advocating for National Review muting any criticisms of Goldwater (Hemmer 2016, 157). Furthermore, there was a chance for an authentic conservative, in their view, to take power at the national level and return this country to the virtuous path that seemingly made America great, before Democrats and the liberal media ruined it. As one overzealous Goldwater supporter put it, the 1964 election was about “whether Constitutional government is to be restored or if our country is going to continue to go further to the Left towards a Communist-​tainted Nazi-​Fascist collectivism and chaos” (Perlstein 2001, 333). The conservative countersphere was foundational to Goldwater’s political rise in the Republican Party in particular and the postwar conservative movement more generally. As Hemmer (2016) observes, “For conservatives [Goldwater’s 1964 campaign] was a genuinely media-​driven campaign . . . one in which [conservative] media activists definitely shaped the right’s understanding of the issues, the candidates, and the parties” (155). In her study of Orange County conservatives, historian Lisa McGirr (2001) discusses their avid consumption of right-​wing publications like Human Events and National Review during this period (95). The conservative countersphere “provided seemingly authoritative voices and helped to build a new level of consciousness and politicization among recruits” (98). According to one Orange County right-​wing activist, “There had to be a coming forth of good conservative writers that could express the view, there had to be a legitimate voice of the conservative position before there could be a growth of the conservative movement” (95). The conservative

 



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countersphere as a discursive space provided the “legitimate voice” of the Right. Article clippings, pamphlets, and books like Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice Not an Echo (1964) or John Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason (1964) were passed around in social circles and political rallies as means of education and recruitment (95–​98). The products of conservative media “were the bibles of the Goldwater nomination drive” (Hemmer 2016, 176). Indeed, Goldwater’s early treatise on conservatism, “The Forgotten American,” was itself published by Human Events as a pamphlet in 1961. The conservative discursive networks “provided the mechanisms of widespread internal communication within the movement, as well as the methods of education that forged the movement culture” (McGirr 2001, 110). The conservative countersphere forged a new identity and language for the Right. It championed America’s “real” values and substantive interests. It provided the accurate story, arming conservatives with the “facts” seemingly ignored by the untrustworthy establishment media. The 1964 election brought the idea of the liberal media from the margins to the center of conservative thought. Members of the press could not prevent manipulation by Democratic administrations, the argument went, but journalists have it in their power to give a fair shake to all candidates running for office. For the conservative countersphere, 1964 shattered that perception. “Once upon a time,” explained Ralph de Toledano (1964) in a Human Events column, “reporters were supposed to report. . . . Their job was to educate, not indoctrinate.” He asserted that for the 1964 election, “that concept of the reporter is old-​fashioned” as they now are self-​appointed kingmakers, “a Daumier of the typewriter, turning out beautiful caricatures” (10). Conservatives were convinced that Goldwater was a helpless victim of these press caricatures. Goldwater served as a vessel for conservative animosity toward the mainstream press. For Goldwater partisans, writes political scientist Jonathan Ladd (2012), criticism of the press “was a defining characteristic of this political faction” (74). Denunciations of the media ricocheted throughout the conservative countersphere during the 1964 election. Right-​wing broadcaster Charles Manion criticized the “slanderous propaganda” of the “paper curtain” that sought to “smother the Goldwater candidacy.” James Kilpatrick decried the “assassins of the fourth estate” for their “vicious bias of the press and the television networks against Barry Goldwater” (Hemmer 2016, 162–​163). William Buckley described the 1964 coverage of Goldwater as simply “vile” (Mulloy 2014, 100). The treatment of Goldwater, in the eyes of conservatives, symbolized everything wrong with the press: its anti-​Americanism; its disdain for hard-​working Americans and the entrepreneurial spirit; its naïve deference to democratic regimes; its bias against conservatives. The 1964 presidential election confirmed conservatives’ suspicions that the establishment press was firmly entrenched in the group of “the Mistaken,” the term oil magnate and right-​wing media baron

 

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H. L. Hunt called any and all of his detractors (Miller 2015, 60). Take, for example, the claims made by a far right hotline, Let Freedom Ring, in May of 1964. The message urged its listeners to “Keep yourself well informed. Do not trust the newspapers, radio, TV, and newsmagazines for your information. These are the main weapons the enemy has to use against us” (Perlstein 2001, 350). The press is liberal. The press hates conservatives. The press is the enemy. The “liberal media bias was an article of faith for most [conservative] media activists, the foundational assumption upon which they staked their legitimacy” (Hemmer 2016, 218). The 1964 presidential election crystalized this notion for conservatives. Yet, most Americans were not convinced that a vast left-​wing conspiracy existed in the press. Conservatives started realizing that complaining among themselves about the biased media would not change the minds of the choir or fellow travelers because they were already sold on the idea. It was time to make their case to the mass public. This required moving beyond the confines of the conservative countersphere and into larger spheres of discourse. The Nixon administration would lead the charge in communicative discourse against the liberal media.

Communicative Discourse: Making the Case Against the “Liberal Media” to the Public By the time Richard Nixon took office, the idea of the liberal media was firmly entrenched in conservative political thought. By taking it beyond the conservative countersphere, the Nixon administration was central to promoting the idea of the liberal media. As Figure 12.2 shows, the New York Times registers the term “liberal media” more frequently beginning in the 1970s. New York Times use of the term “liberal media” 1930s–1990s 80

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Figure 12.2  New York Times’ use of the term “liberal media,” 1930s–​1990s.

 



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Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, was relentless in characterizing the press as an unsavory fraternity of biased elites; this “little group of men . . . wield a free hand in selecting, presenting, and interpreting the great issues of our nation.” “The views of the fraternity,” Agnew asserted, “do not represent the views of America.” The conservative critique of the liberal media was now part of the national conversation. Furthermore, Agnew’s speeches were reprinted in Human Events and favorably covered in other outlets of the conservative countersphere, providing a feedback effect for the Right. In addition to the Nixon administration, the Right took part in other public-​facing, communicative discourse endeavors like William Buckley’s Firing Line, which first aired in 1966; Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media (AIM), founded in 1969; or the handful of books from Edith Efron, Pat Buchanan, Joseph Keeley, and John R. Coyne Jr. alleging left-​wing bias in the mainstream press that emerged during the early 1970s (Bauer 2018; Cimaglio 2016). Many of these same authors enjoyed column space in TV Guide to bash the press, one of the highest-​circulating publications at the time. The rise and success of talk radio and Fox News presented a new prism for assessing the path of the liberal media critique in the conservative countersphere. The history of right-​wing discursive spaces has been found predominantly in niche media markets. For example, National Review, Human Events, and the Weekly Standard, while influential, never enjoyed mass circulation rates. Fox News and talk radio smashed the status quo of limited reach of the conservative countersphere. By the late 1990s, Fox News and talk radio programs like Rush Limbaugh’s were firmly entrenched in the mainstream media. These outlets would never claim membership in the mainstream, as that would violate their image of beleaguered outsiders. More important, they amplified the communicative discourse of bashing the “liberal media.” The nearly five years of conservative communicative discourse attacking the establishment press has paid off. Though the right-​wing critique of a liberal media is, according to one communication scholar, “an intellectual failure, riddled with contradictions and inaccuracy,” the belief that the media is liberal is firmly ingrained in conventional wisdom (McChesney 2004, 110). According to one study of press coverage between 1992 and 2002, “references to the liberal bias of the news media outnumber references to a conservative bias by a factor of more than 17 to 1” (McChesney 2004, 113). Many Americans believe the news has a liberal bias, a claim frequently charged by conservative pundits (Domke et al. 1999; Watts et al. 1999; Ladd 2012). It is still subject to intense scrutiny by the right wing as the mainstream media is one of the most frequently discussed issues on Rush Limbaugh and other talk radio programs (Ladd 2012, 79; Berry and Sobieraj 2014). According to one study of the contemporary right-​ wing media ecosystem, attacking the integrity and professionalism of the press was a “central theme” during the 2016 presidential election (Faris et al. 2017).

 

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Furthermore, a recent Pew Research study finds that nearly 90 percent of conservatives believe that the national news media have a negative effect on the way things are going in the United States. As Rick Perlstein (2003) has argued, the Right “fight the media war ruthlessly, and they are winning” (53).

Conclusion This chapter makes the case for conceptual architecture to help the emerging subfield of conservative news coalesce around a shared concept (conservative countersphere) and approach (linking ideas, actors, and institutions). Discursive institutionalism—​which takes seriously the essential content of ideas as well as the interactive dynamism by which ideas are conveyed (Schmidt 2008)—​allows us to examine right-​wing discourse operating in multiple spheres. This conceptual framework places special emphasis on how institutions structure discourses created by individuals. This approach gives primacy to the role of institutions that other interpretive methods like discourse analysis generally overlook. Through “coordinative discourse” in the conservative countersphere, partisans of the Right developed and articulated narratives within their own community. Importantly, this institutional context during the 1950s and 1960s provided a safe space for conservatives to construct the notion that the establishment media was liberal. This idea would not gain traction in a different discursive environment during the same period, just as the conservative countersphere would not entertain the notion that the mainstream press slanted right. The institutional context empowers or constrains the ideas actors are able to convey. It is for this same reason that the conservative claim that the mainstream press holds an inherent liberal bias was met, at first, with resistance in wider public spheres. It took years of “communicative discourse” by prominent conservatives like Richard Nixon to sell the mass public on the idea that the press was something to hold in contempt. To be clear, political elites weave in and out of the conservative countersphere employing both coordinative and communicative discourses. In addition, coordinative and communicative discourses may occur simultaneously. President Trump illustrates this point well. Trump relies largely on Fox News and Breitbart for his “news.” Not only is Trump receiving information but also he is communicating with these outlets by granting them interviews. This is an example of Trump interacting with other like-​minded actors like Sean Hannity engaging in “coordinative discourse.” After consuming information generated in the conservative countersphere, Trump disseminates the party line to the broader public through “communicative discourse” via Twitter. Those messages, in turn, receive

 



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further amplification through the mainstream press because of Trump’s authoritative position and the sensationalism of his messages. In this chapter, I  have made the argument for thinking institutionally about conservative news and discourses. Discursive institutionalism is an innovative approach for scholars of all disciplines and methodological persuasions. This analytical framework allows scholars to examine conservative communication operating in multiple discursive spheres. I have also advocated for the more rigorous term “conservative countersphere” as a way to describe right-​wing news to serve as a bridge for scholars of conservative news and cultures across disparate academic disciplines to forge a common language. Examining the conservative countersphere through the lens of ideas, individuals, and institutions is a productive step forward in this emerging subfield of political communication and media studies.

References Bauer, A. J. 2018. “Journalism History and Conservative Erasure.” American Journalism 35 (1): 2–​26. Berry, Jeffrey M., and Sarah Sobieraj. 2014. The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility. New York: Oxford University Press. Blyth, Mark, Oddny Helgadottir, and William Kring. 2016. “Ideas and Historical Institutionalism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism, edited by Orfeo Fioretos, Tulia G. Falleti, and Adam Sheingate, 142–​162. New York: Oxford University Press. Brinkley, Alan. 1994. “The Problem of American Conservatism.” American Historical Review 99 (2): 409–​429. Buckley, William F. 1957. “Why the South Must Prevail.” National Review, August 24. Carstensen, Martin, and Vivien Schmidt. 2016. “Power Through, over and in Ideas: Conceptualizing Ideational Power in Discursive Institutionalism.” Journal of European Public Policy 23 (3): 318–​337. Cimaglio, Christopher. 2016. “‘A Tiny and Closed Fraternity of Privileged Men’:  The Nixon-​ Agnew Antimedia Campaign and the Liberal Roots of the U.S. Conservative ‘Liberal Media’ Critique.” International Journal of Communication 10: 1–​19. de Toledano, Ralph. 1964. “Sen. Goldwater and the Press.” Human Events, April 25, 10. Domke, David, Mark D. Watts, Dhavan V. Shah, and David P. Fan. 1999. “The Politics of Conservative Elites and the ‘Liberal Media’ Argument.” Journal of Communication 49 (4): 35–​58. Faris, Rob, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler. 2017. “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation:  Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University. https://​cyber.harvard.edu/​publications/​2017/​08/​mediacloud. Fraser, Nancy. 1992. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 109–​142. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Greenberg, David. 2008. “The Idea of the ‘Liberal Media’ and Its Roots in the Civil Rights Movement.” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 1 (2): 167–​186. Hemmer, Nicole. 2016. Messengers of the Right:  Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

 

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Hendershot, Heather. 2011. What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-​Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Houck, Davis W., and Matthew A. Grindy. 2008. Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Hustwit, William P. 2011. “From Caste to Color Blindness: James J. Kilpatrick’s Segregationist Semantics.” Journal of Southern History 7: 639–​670. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, and Joseph N. Cappella. 2008. Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. New York: Oxford University Press. Kulawik, Teresa. 2009. “Staking the Frame of a Feminist Discursive Institutionalism.” Politics & Gender 5 (2): 262–​271. Ladd, Jonathan M. 2012. Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lebovic, Sam. 2017. “When the ‘Mainstream Media’ Was Conservative: Media Criticism in the Age of Reform.” In Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America, edited by Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, 63–​76. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lowndes, Joseph. 2008. From the New Deal to the New Right:  Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Major, Mark. 2012. “Objective but Not Impartial:  Human Events, Barry Goldwater, and the Development of the ‘Liberal Media’ in the Conservative Counter-​Sphere.” New Political Science 34 (4): 455–​468. Major, Mark. 2015. “Conservative Consciousness and the Press: The Institutional Contribution to the Idea of the ‘Liberal Media’ in Right-​Wing Discourse.” Critical Sociology 41 (3): 483–​491. McChesney, Robert W. 2004. The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century. New York: Monthly Review Press. McGirr, Lisa. 2001. Suburban Warriors:  The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McPherson, James Brian. 2008. The Conservative Resurgence and the Press: The Media’s Role in the Rise of the Right. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Miller, Edward H. 2015. Nut Country:  Right-​Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moreton, Bethany. 2010. To Serve God and Wal-​Mart:  The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mulloy, D. J. 2014. The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Perlstein, Rick. 2001. Before the Storm:  Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. New York: Nation Books. Perlstein, Rick. 2003. “Eyes Right: Conservatives are Winning the Media War. How Do They Do It?” Columbia Journalism Review (March/​April). Perlstein, Rick. 2008. Nixonland:  The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. New York: Scribner. Phillips-​Fein, Kim. 2011. “Conservatism:  A State of the Field.” Journal of American History 98 (3): 723–​743. Robin, Corey. 2018. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Schmidt, Vivien A. 2008. “Discursive Institutionalism:  The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse.” Annual Review of Political Science 11: 303–​326. Schmidt, Vivien A. 2010. “Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously:  Explaining Change Through Discursive Institutionalism as the Fourth ‘New Institutionalism.’” European Political Science Review 2 (1): 1–​25. Schmidt, Vivien A. 2011. “Speaking of Change: Why Discourse Is Key to the Dynamics of Policy Transformation.” Critical Policy Studies 5 (2): 106–​126. Schmidt, Vivien A. 2012. “A Curious Constructivism:  A Response to Professor Bell.” British Journal of Political Science 42 (3): 705–​713.

 



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Schmidt, Vivien A. 2016. “Discursive Institutionalism:  Understanding Policy in Context.” In Handbook of Critical Policy Studies, edited by Frank Fischer, Douglas Torgerson, Anna Durnova, and Michael Orsini, 171–​189. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Streitmatter, Rodger. 2008. Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14 (1): 49–​90. Watts, Mark D., David Domke, Dhavan V. Shah, and David P. Fan. 1999. “Elite Cues and Media Bias in Presidential Campaigns: Explaining Public Perceptions of a Liberal Press.” Communication Research 26 (2): 144–​175. Zelizer, Julian E. 2010. “Rethinking the History of American Conservatism.” Reviews in American History 38: 367–​392.

 

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Conservative News Studies Mapping an Unrealized Field Anthony Nadler and A . J. Bauer

Observing a slide toward ideological segmentation in US news in 2010, the editors of Columbia Journalism Review urged journalists to escape their silos. “Ideas,” they wrote, “are meant to be shared, to redefine themselves over the blue flame of discussion. Consumed in isolation they taste bland. Kept too long they get rancid. That’s a problem in America, where we increasingly live in separate information silos” (Editors 2010). While discourse silos operate differently in journalism than in the academy, we share the Columbia Journalism Review editors’ general concern about their stifling effects. Various conservative news outlets, personalities, and programs have been objects of study, but conservative news itself has not yet emerged as an object around which a sustained and ongoing intellectual conversation has formed. A social networking map of scholarship on conservative news would look a lot like an archipelago; few debates or threads have formed to bridge the extant disciplinary and subdisciplinary conversations pertinent to its coherent study. The last several years have seen a steady growth of both journalistic (e.g., Sherman 2014; Mayer 2016)  and scholarly work (e.g., Hemmer 2016; Hendershot 2011, 2016; Jamieson and Cappella 2008)  across disciplines examining the people, organizations, cultural forms, structures, and practices that compose news on the right. The journals New Political Science (Burack and Snyder-​Hall 2012) and Communication, Culture & Critique (Ouellette and Banet-​Weiser 2018)  have both devoted special issues to the topics of “Right-​ Wing Populism and the Media” and “Media and the Extreme Right,” respectively. Political Communication published a call for a new “Fox News Studies” subfield (Yglesias 2018). Historians, who have otherwise led the way in elucidating the modern conservative movement (Zelizer 2010), have acknowledged a historiographical gap in the study of media institutions’ role in mobilizing the 232

 



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Right (Phillips-​Fein 2011, 735). In short:  studies of conservative and right-​ wing media are proliferating but to date have proceeded unevenly, cross-​cutting several traditional disciplines and subfields, with little continuity or citational overlap. In this chapter, we offer a bird’s eye view of key themes around which much of the existing scholarship pertaining to conservative news has clustered. We analyze how scholars have approached the notion of “liberal bias” and conservative news; three different approaches to understanding the influence of conservative media—​as propaganda, as media effects, and as deep stories reflecting fundamental narratives and emotional templates animating conservatism; and finally, the place of media in historical accounts of the growth of modern conservatism. Our hope is that this topographical sketch will help inspire intellectual exchange and dialogue across the scholarly islands upon which these conversations have so far taken place.

The “Liberal Media”: Bias and Perceptions Thereof As recently as the late 1940s, common sense in the United States held that the predominant forms of mass media (i.e., newspapers and increasingly radio) were characterized by conservative or right-​wing ideological bias (Pickard 2014; Bauer 2017). Belief in left-​wing or “liberal media” bias, while socially rooted in the rise of the postwar conservative movement (Major and Lane, this volume), was bolstered in the 1970s by a series of highly publicized works of conservative media criticism. Vice President Spiro Agnew’s 1969 invective against television news set the tone as a group of anticommunists, led by Reed Irvine, launched Accuracy in Media (AIM)—​a nonpartisan, but demonstrably conservative, media watchdog group devoted to publicizing putative examples of liberal bias in the big three television networks and major newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times. Perhaps the first book-​length critique of such liberal bias was The News Twisters (1971), an analysis of television news coverage of the 1968 presidential campaign by conservative journalist and TV Guide staff writer Edith Efron. Though her data and methods were strongly criticized by social scientists, who attempted and failed to replicate her findings (Stevenson et al. 1973), Efron’s content analysis identified rampant bias in favor of the “Democratic-​ liberal-​left axis of opinion” and against the “Republican-​conservative-​right.” Attributing this bias to “power lust,” Efron (1971) nevertheless found there to be “no conspiracy whatever in network news departments” (207)—​a conclusion she undermined the following year with the sequel How CBS Tried to Kill a Book (1972), which chronicled the network’s alleged attempts to stifle public awareness of her work.

 

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Avoiding the polemics of Agnew, AIM, and Efron, though benefitting from growing public discourse around the problem of press bias, other conservative media critics engaged more directly with social scientific literature. In Mediacracy (1975), former Nixon campaign strategist Kevin Phillips attributed liberal media bias to the emergence of a postindustrial society. Drawing on the works of prominent sociologists Daniel Bell, David Riesman, and C.  Wright Mills, among others, Phillips contended that the declining political economic dominance of the manufacturing sector combined with increasing investment in information technology and communication sectors beginning in the 1960s resulted in a “knowledge elite.” Unlike the elite of the industrial era, who harbored conservative political tendencies, Phillips argued that the postindustrial elite had both cultural and pecuniary interests in promoting liberal social policies that challenged traditional racial and religious values of middle-​class white Americans, especially those living in the Sun Belt or otherwise removed from the power centers of New  York and Washington, DC. A  similar story of this new elite was detailed by conservative political sociologists S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman, who in 1981 published a highly influential essay in Public Opinion on “Media and Business Elites.” Based on interviews with some 240 print and broadcast journalists working at national outlets, Lichter and Rothman identified the “media elite” as overwhelmingly white, male, highly educated, and Democratic in their voting habits. Lichter and Rothman, along with Linda Lichter, expanded these findings in The Media Elite: America’s New Powerbrokers (1986), which received high praise from conservative media activists but, perhaps as importantly, provoked further scholarly debate. Despite being challenged for their lack of methodological and analytical rigor (Gans 1985), studies of liberal media bias by conservatives were taken seriously by political communication and media studies scholars. While some subsequent survey research bolstered the Rothman-​Lichters claim that journalists tended to be personally more liberal than the general public (Weaver and Wilhoit 1996), others found journalists to be “centrist” or even more conservative than the general public when it comes to certain issues (Croteau 1999). Critics have more forcefully challenged the second half of the conservative claim, that the personal political beliefs of journalists somehow impact news judgment and framing. Content analyses of presidential campaign coverage, Efron aside, have been unable to find evidence of substantial partisan bias (Hofstetter 1976; Robinson 1983; D’Alessio and Allen 2000). Furthermore, there is little evidence that consuming mainstream cable news is associated with liberal political attitude formation (DiMaggio, this volume). While studies of partisan bias have been largely fruitless, they have tended to confirm the existence of nonpartisan professional biases in the press (Dennis 1997). Indeed, building on pathbreaking ethnographic and historical studies that elucidated a distinct professional ideology

 



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within the US press (Molotch and Lester 1974; Tuchman 1978; Schudson 1978; Gans 1979), many scholars and journalists have instead found evidence of structural bias in favor of conservative characteristics of the bipartisan status quo, specifically corporate capitalism and military interventionism oversees (Gitlin 1980; Bagdikian 1983; Herman and Chomsky 1988; McChesney 1999; Alterman 2003). As Robert Hackett (1984) has argued, the bias paradigm in news media studies tends to take for granted that the press is capable of noncontroversially depicting political reality. In the absence of universal or at least trans-​ideological standards of journalistic and social scientific judgment, the concept of “balance” has often served as a conceptual stand-​in, if not for objectivity, at least for the absence of bias. By bolstering the possibility of an unbiased press, research into the existence of a liberal media has resulted in a sort of bias feedback loop—​ where a finding of no bias itself takes the appearance of bias, just as a finding of bias seems to only confirm the political inclinations of the researcher. Indeed, while there has been little social scientific corroboration of liberal media bias, conservative activists continue to insist that press bias is a real and present danger (Irvine 1984; Rusher 1988; Limbaugh 1993; Goldberg 2001; Bozell 2004; Anderson 2005; Gibson 2009; Groseclose 2011; Kurtz 2018). While some are inclined to thus declare the “liberal media” a myth (Edwards and Cromwell 2005), scholars of conservative news may find it more compelling to follow the lead of researchers who have instead turned toward better understanding why perceptions of press bias exist and persist (Niven 2002). Hostile media perception survey research has, for example, elucidated the role played by conservative elites (Domke et  al. 1999; Watts et  al. 1999)  in stoking public skepticism of the press in the United States, which helps explain why Republican Party identification and conservative ideology tend to correlate with higher levels of media distrust (Lee 2005, 2010; Gottfried, Stocking, and Grieco 2018). Meanwhile, a growing body of historical research focused on conservative media activism has lent further insight into when and how belief in a liberal media came to predominate in the United States. Early examples of right-​wing anti-​communist media criticism can be traced back to the late 1930s (Bauer 2017), although the “liberal media” trope was developed primarily in the immediate postwar years by conservative journalists and media activists, especially those in the orbits of Human Events (Major 2012) and the National Review (Hemmer 2016). While television coverage of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s played a crucial role in cementing the idea of a liberal media as a Southern and Sun Belt common sense (Greenberg 2008), the conservative media criticism that flourished from the 1970s onward has also been shown to have rhetorical and tactical roots in both early twentieth-​century anti-​Semitism (Gillis 2017)  and the progressive media reform efforts of the

 

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1940s (Cimaglio 2016; Bauer 2018). While critics and scholars will no doubt continue to examine whether and how bias works in conservative media outlets (Brock, Rabin-​Havt, and Media Matters for America 2012), a robust conservative news literature must also provide better understanding of how perceptions of bias emerged among the conservative press and their audiences (see Lane and Major, this volume), and how those perceptions influence conservative journalistic output and audience engagement.

Right-​Wing News as Propaganda A significant strain of criticism and scholarship examining right-​wing news—​ particularly its populist variants—​does so through the lens of propaganda analysis. Of course, “propaganda” is a notoriously difficult term to define. It is impossible to escape accusations of bias or partisanship in how it is applied. In the middle of the twentieth century, liberal and right-​wing critics both championed their cause to be one of exposing propaganda—​sometimes pointing their fingers at each other (Bauer 2017). Yet, debates over partisan biases are far from the only contentions surrounding the concept of propaganda. The concept has also been challenged by at least two strange intellectual bedfellows. Positivist social scientists of the mid-​twentieth century largely rejected the propaganda paradigm as unscientific (Sproule 1997). Later, scholars of a poststructuralist sensibility also largely rejected propaganda as a critical lens. For them, propaganda criticism seems to rely on an epistemology that too confidently asserts a distinction between the distorted vision of the propagandist with that of the clear-​eyed rationalist. Modern propaganda criticism arose after World War I, as cinema, radio, and chain newspapers were heralding a new era of mass communication in American culture, and as the business of public relations was taking shape (Sproule 1997; Gary 1999). It is helpful to distinguish between two tendencies of propaganda criticism, each manifest in certain strains of critical scholarship on conservative news and opinion media. One of these tendencies, the “systems perspectives” approach, understands propaganda in terms of the control or monopolization of a social group’s dominant media organs. This line of criticism does not focus on lone propagandists, but rather on larger political economic structures—​such as corporatized media systems or partisan media ecosystems—​that systematically favor a particular ideology. Another tendency, the “demagogical perspective,” focuses on individual propagandists deploying manipulative communication strategies to mobilize fervent groups of supporters. The former approach primarily focuses on the control of the means of knowledge and opinion, while the latter tends to emphasize emotion, affect, and manipulative rhetorical techniques.

 



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The systems approach to propaganda first took shape in the United States in the early twentieth century. At this time, newspaper ownership was becoming increasingly concentrated and open partisanship was declining (Kaplan 2001). After World War I, many journalists, including notable cultural critics like Walter Lippmann, accused the American press as serving as a conduit for state and pro-​ business propaganda (Marzolf 1991, 108–​116). The reasoning behind these critiques varied, including concerns that a rising class of publicity agents was unduly influencing the press and that the press had capitulated to government viewpoints during the war. One leading and populist edge of this critique came from those who saw the US press as mere mouthpieces for wealthy owners, press barons, and the capitalist class generally. Upton Sinclair spoke to these fears as he excoriated his local paper, the Los Angeles Times, charging that “all its accounts of strikes are hate-​stories, entirely disregarding the facts; all its accounts of political events and conditions, local, state, or national are class-​propaganda” (Sinclair 1919, 209). Sinclair was not alone. Labor organizers, progressives, socialists, and other liberal and left groups condemned systematic bias in favor of the privileged classes and the interests of capital over labor (Reynolds and Hicks 2012). By the 1930s, media criticism coming from Popular Front and New Deal advocates regularly took aim at what they called “the conservative press” (Lebovic 2017). Yet this referred to quite a different notion than what we call conservative news cultures in this book, as the so-​called conservative press of the 1930s was not associated with an organized, ideological movement but instead with the pecuniary interests of its owners. By the 1950s, as several of the authors in this volume explore (Lane, Major, and Pickard; see also Hemmer 2016; Major 2012), conservative media activists had themselves developed a propaganda systems critique of national US media outlets. Postwar conservatives invoked a populist framing in their charges against liberal media that borrowed tropes from progressive critiques of the dominant media in prior decades (Lebovic 2017; Cimaglio 2016). The conservative critique blamed the news media’s propagandistic qualities on the conformist thinking of journalists and editors—​as members of the “liberal Establishment” (Lane, this volume)—​rather than advancing the economic structuralist critique of progressives and leftists. A different propaganda systems critique, however, has re-​emerged with the growth of conservative talk radio, Fox News, and online news sites (e.g., Meagher 2012; Brock 2004). Kathleen Hall Jamieson and James Cappella (2008) argue that conservative media have created an echo chamber that functions as a “bounded, enclosed media space that has the potential to both magnify messages within it and insulate them from rebuttal” (76). While Jamieson and Cappella do not use the term “propaganda,” they argue that the conservative echo chamber systematically insulates its audiences from contrary opinions

 

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and prompts “the balkanization of conservative media audiences’ knowledge and interpretation” (238). More recently, a group of researchers affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society have analyzed the influence of what they frame as a “right-​wing media ecosystem” that produces “network propaganda” (Faris et al. 2017; Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 2018). This research draws primarily on a network analysis of how information from right-​wing news sites circulates online. Adjacent approaches have considered the respective roles played by Astroturf organizing (DiMaggio 2011) and political branding (White 2018) in mediated conservative community formation. The other strain of propaganda criticism turns toward uncovering manipulative rhetorical or psychological techniques used by propagandists. This demagogical approach to propaganda criticism first flourished in the United States in the 1930s. Liberal and progressive critics took aim at what they believed were the mesmerizing or otherwise psychologically manipulative appeals of fascist or proto-​fascist demagogues. Near the same time, right-​leaning groups argued that many of these progressive propaganda critics were blind to left propaganda, and by the 1940s outlets like the right-​wing newsletter Counterattack were fashioning their own analysis of what they interpreted to be communist propaganda (Bauer 2018). The short-​lived Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) developed the most widely circulated educational framework of the propaganda criticism genre, identifying “Seven Propaganda Devices” (Sproule 2001). Writing on the institute’s behalf, Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth Briant Lee (1939) used this frame for an influential analysis of the speeches, though propaganda critics developed some quite different frames for understanding the power and appeal of Father Coughlin. Leo Lowenthal and Nathan Guterman (1949) produced one of the most complex analyses of propagandistic techniques in their study of fascist “agitators” in the United States. Drawing on a Frankfurt school legacy of mixing psychoanalysis with social theory, Lowenthal and Guterman did not present agitators’ rhetorical devices as simple logical fallacies or traps for individual gullibility. Rather, they emphasized historical circumstances producing conditions that give rise to particular social/​psychological longings that agitators could arouse. Still, the paradigm of propaganda analysis and criticism receded in popularity as a scholarly method in the period following World War II. Within communication scholarship, there was a shift toward quantitative analyses seeking to precisely measure “media effects.” Media effects researchers tended to see propaganda analysis as lacking in scientific rigor, and a model suggesting mass media had “limited effects” on persuasion became ascendant (Sproule 1997; Pooley 2008). The flourishing of conservative talk radio in the 1990s prompted a modest revival of the demagogical approach to propaganda analysis. Radio scholars, in

 



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particular, drew on the language of propaganda analysis to draw comparisons between Rush Limbaugh and Father Coughlin (Kay, Ziegelmueller, and Minch 1998; Larson 1997; Swain 1999). As popular forms of conservative news have spread to wider media formats, some scholars continue using content analysis to identify techniques or devices associated with propaganda (Bard 2017; Minnite 2012). For instance, Mike Conway, Maria Elizabeth Grabe, and Kevin Grieves (2007) have compared Bill O’Reilly’s “Talking Point Memo”—​a segment from his hit Fox News show—​to Father Coughlin’s radio addresses, arguing that O’Reilly is a “heavier and less nuanced user” (197) of the seven propaganda devices than was Coughlin.

Partisan News and Media Effects The two types of propaganda criticism mentioned previously tend to draw on different methods. Systemic approaches turn toward sociological examinations of media production, while demagogical approaches center on textual or content analysis. Media effect research, on the other hand, typically studies media audiences by trying to measure the impacts of media consumption on audiences’ beliefs and attitudes. This is primarily a quantitative endeavor. Some studies rely on experimental methods in lab settings, while others focus on opinion surveys, field experiments, or data sources such as voting records. Some media effects scholarship uses the term “propaganda” (Barker 2002), despite historic differences between classic propaganda criticism and the media effects paradigm. However, unlike propaganda analysis’ unmistakable normative claims, media effects approaches do not necessarily start with normative assumptions. Media effects researchers—​more than rhetorical critics, critical theorists, or cultural historians—​often frame their studies around partisan news (both right and left) rather than focusing merely on conservative news. Media effects researchers have analyzed relationships between partisan news viewership and variables such as voting behavior (DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007; Dilliplane 2014), changes in viewers’ beliefs or the intensity of beliefs (Zúñiga, Correa, and Valenzuela 2012; Feldman et al. 2012), the polarization of political attitudes (Iyengar and Hahn 2009; Stroud 2011), and how partisan news affects consumers’ knowledge of current events (Schroeder and Stone 2015; Morris 2005). There is, undoubtedly, a divide between quantitative media effects research and more qualitative or humanistic approaches to understanding conservative news, and scholars on each side of this divide have rarely been in conversation with each other. While this book tends toward the humanistic and qualitative side, we want to suggest that there are good reasons for scholars to engage each other across this divide.

 

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Critical scholars have frequently framed media effects research as anchored to a positivist mode of thinking (Gitlin 1980; Hall 2006). While critique of rigid positivism in media studies has been fruitful, we should resist the urge to overgeneralize and caricaturize all effects research. Careful effects research situates findings in particular social contexts and avoids sweeping generalizations about uniform media effects across disparate circumstances. Even for those skeptical of unilateral causal models of media influence, effects research may still provide illuminating insights and snapshots of key dynamics at particular historical moments. This research can add complexity and nuance in theorizing the relationships between partisan news media and its publics. Consider polarization studies, for example. Media effects research suggests that contemporary partisan media contribute to polarization but not necessarily in a uniform or straightforward manner. Levendusky (2013) draws on a series of experiments involving exposure to partisan programming from Fox News and MSNBC to suggest that these media “polarize the electorate by taking relatively extreme citizens and making them even more extreme” (611). Levendusky argues that these polarization tendencies are mediated by processes of motivated reasoning most pronounced among strong partisans. Other social scientific researchers (Mason 2018; Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012)  have challenged the common-​sense understanding of polarization as primarily an ideological phenomenon. These studies suggest that contemporary US partisan media are not principally promoting increased extremism in ideological commitments or policy preferences; rather, they are amplifying “affective polarization” in which partisans experience a greater animosity toward their opposing party.

Deep Stories and Emotional Resonance Another approach to studying media’s political impacts seeks to understand the deep emotional ties between individuals and conservative ideas or communities. Such approaches are usually informed by cultural studies, and sometimes critical theory, traditions that highlight the crucial role of affective attachments in political mobilization. Scholars such as Linda Kintz (1997), Julie Lesage (1998), Paul Apostolidis (2000), and Reece Peck (2019) suggest that examining ideology alone is not sufficient to understand the political life of conservative publics. Kintz (1997) argues that whether examining the Left, Right, or center, the secular or religious, “politics are not only about abstract reasoning or economic interests but also about belief, which combines the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious, thought and feeling, the abstract and the physical” (5). This lineage of criticism turns to conservative media to understand the passionate attachments it speaks to and inspires. These critics

 



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also explore how the frames offered by conservative media can become deeply interwoven into everyday experiences. Scholars seeking to understand these emotional resonances distinguish their projects from the approach taken by most propaganda critics. Epistemologically, this approach tries to make sense of attachments “from the inside.” Apostolidis (2000), in his study of James Dobson’s radio program Focus on the Family, argues that it is “crucial not to prejudge the ethical and cognitive sensibilities” in Christian Right culture “as many critics of the Christian Right do. Those who are not adherents or supporters of the movement can come to understand the reasons for its power all the more vividly the more they allow themselves a spontaneous response to the movement’s appeals to widely shared hopes, fears, and experiences” (10). In an ethnographic study of Tea Party activists and other conservative voters in Louisiana, Arlie Hochschild (2016) frames her analysis as a trek over an “empathy wall” seeking to uncover the “deep story” animating the political activity and beliefs among those she is studying. Hochschild describes a deep story as “the story feelings tell, in the language of symbols. It removes judgment. It removes fact. It tells us how things feel” (135). Hochschild’s concept of the “deep story” offers a memorable frame for an approach that grounds political sense making in ingrained templates of cognition and emotion. A critical tension in the analysis of conservative media through the lens of deep stories is discerning the extent to which conservative media reflect pre-​ existing templates or whether and how these media shape and cultivate such templates. Francesca Polletta and Jessica Callahan (2017) argue against the temptation to interpret deep stories as direct reflections of a group’s collective lived experiences. Instead, they contend that the act of storytelling itself crafts shared understandings of social identity through repetition and relies on processes through which “stories produced by media elites come to feel as if they reflect people’s experience” (392). Peck (this volume and 2019) offers such a perspective through an extended analysis of the active role Fox News plays in channeling emotional attachments and articulating deep stories to partisan projects. In Peck’s analysis, Fox News’ storytelling repeatedly fuses a contingent set of tastes (country music, for instance) with an imagined social identity (white, working class) and a political ideology (conservatism). Peck (2019) also examines the “deep moral logics Fox programs deploy to legitimate conservative economic policies” while its pundits seek to manage “the limitations, contradictions and risks inherent in using populist rhetoric to defend the business class and the wealthy.” For Peck, Polletta, and Callahan, then, the deep stories of conservative news media draw on reservoirs of experience and emotion, yet news outlets themselves play an active role in giving these experiences meaning and articulating their political significance.

 

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On the Periphery of Historiography Since its emergence as a coherent object of analysis in the early 1950s, postwar American conservatism has been theorized, in part, as a media effect. Writing in the first scholarly book to identify and investigate the motivations of the so-​ called pseudo-​conservatives who composed the base of support for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red scare, historian Richard Hofstadter (1963) reasoned, “the growth of mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators feel themselves involved.” He continued, “Thus it has become, more than ever before, an arena into which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected” (94). The collection’s editor, sociologist Daniel Bell (1963), concurred that studying demagoguery was key to understanding postwar conservatism. “McCarthy himself must be a puzzle to conventional political analysis,” he wrote. “Calling him a demagogue explains little; the relevant questions are to whom was he a demagogue, and about what” (58). In the intervening decades, historians of modern conservatism have shed considerable light on this question by highlighting the shifts in postwar US culture and social life that expanded conservatism’s political base, ideologically realigned the two major political parties, and provided countless opportunities for multiple generations of conservative activists to build institutions, contest elections, and shape policy. Once an afterthought of historical scholarship (Brinkley 1994), modern conservatism has received thorough and sustained historiographical attention for more than twenty-​five years now. Yet, until quite recently (McPherson 2008; Hendershot 2011, 2016; Thrift 2014; Hemmer 2016; Bauer 2017), historians of modern conservatism have mostly refrained from framing their studies around the roles played by mass and alternative media in the creation of the Right (Phillips-​Fein 2011, 735; Viguerie and Franke 2004). While further inquiry along these lines is sorely needed—​and journalism historians, in particular, are well positioned to take the lead (Bauer 2018)—​the existing historiography of modern conservatism is not without insights for scholars of conservative news cultures (e.g., Hill 2018). As we define it, conservative news is as old as the conservative movement itself.1 Following the lead of George Nash’s highly influential intellectual history of modern conservatism (Nash [1976] 1998; Burns 2004), historians have

  This is not to say that conservative news and the conservative movement are the same thing. Indeed, historians of conservative news cultures ought to investigate the contingent relationships between the conservative movement, media activists, and right-​wing media producers. 1

 



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generally considered the US conservative movement as a postwar phenomenon involving the convergence of anti-​communism, laissez-​faire economics, and support for maintaining traditional racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies. While rooted in prewar business opposition to the New Deal (Phillips-​Fein 2009), from the late 1940s through the early 1960s conservative activists founded a series of oft-​interconnected organizations and publications designed to amplify conservative ideas and mobilize a right-​wing political base. While the National Review most famously attempted to legitimate conservative ideology within elite political circles (Hemmer 2016; Lane, this volume), conservatism was often spread at the grassroots by nationally coordinated local discussion groups like Facts Forum (Bauer 2017), the Christian Anti-​Communism Crusade (McGirr 2001), and the John Birch Society (Mulloy 2014), and on campus by student groups like Young Americans for Freedom (Andrew 1997; Schneider 1999; DiBranco, this volume) and, later, Students in Free Enterprise (Moreton 2009)—​each group a source of various newsletters, magazines, and pamphlets that constituted a nascent movement of print culture that has been understudied as such. Localized case studies of conservative movement formation have provided rich, if preliminary, portraits of the distinct news environments in which conservative ideas and identities flourished in the mid-​twentieth century. In her foundational study of conservative organizing in postwar Orange County, California, historian Lisa McGirr (2001) demonstrates how the social milieu of a suburban community with deep ties to the Cold War defense industry helped render concrete otherwise abstract right-​wing political and economic theories. While not explicitly focused on the role of local news, McGirr suggests that the geographic specificity of the modern conservative worldview resulted from the admixture of various nationally distributed right-​wing periodicals and newsletters with the local reporting and commentary of the Santa Ana Daily Register, published by libertarian Raymond Cyrus Hoiles, and the more socially conservative American Standard. Tula Connell’s (2016) exemplary study of postwar conservatism in Milwaukee draws this connection more directly, examining at length the political economic and ideological shifts in local print and broadcast markets that bolstered right-​wing activists in their efforts to undermine New Deal notions of the common good. Bethany Moreton’s (2009) innovative account of Wal-​Mart’s role in spreading modern conservatism takes a more regional approach that nevertheless provides a useful model for working with hyperlocal news. Reading items published in the retail giant’s employee newsletter Wal-​Mart World, Moreton identifies the regionally distinct subjectivities that synthesized free market ideology with evangelical Christianity in the Sun Belt. While conservative ideas took root in locally and regionally specific news environments, by the mid-​1960s the modern conservative movement was an increasingly powerful

 

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player in the political narratives of national media outlets (e.g., Sevareid et al. [1962] 2005). For many, the Republican Party’s nomination of conservative darling Senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election signaled the movement’s growing political might. Goldwater’s landslide defeat at the hands of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, which he in part attributed to press bias (Major 2012), was initially viewed as a major setback by movement conservatives. But historians have shown the loss to be the beginning of a successful decades-​long effort by the movement to capture the Republican Party and redefine it according to conservative ideological standards—​with Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election to the presidency as their crowning achievement (Perlstein 2001, 2008, 2014). This long ascension narrative tempers earlier historical explanations for Reagan’s success, which tended to overemphasize the role of so-​called Reagan Democrats, white working-​class voters who switched parties in favor of The Gipper (Rieder 1985; Formisano 1991). Indeed, for much of the 1980s and 1990s, conservative movement ascendency was framed as a reaction against liberal social policies, especially pertaining to race (Edsall and Edsall 1991). This so-​called backlash thesis spawned debate over the extent to which conservative gains in the 1970s are attributable to the movement’s mobilization of white racial resentment in reaction to gains made by social justice movements (Zelizer 2010). Some historians of racial conservatism have sought to reject the backlash thesis through illuminating the longer historical trajectories of white supremacist politics within the modern conservative movement (Lowndes 2008; Crespino 2007), while others have pointed to midcentury shifts in the social geography of whiteness to explain why conservative racial politics gained wider purchase in the 1970s (Kruse 2007; Lassiter 2006). In any case, national media coverage of the civil rights movement does seem to have contributed to conservative skepticism of the press (Greenberg 2008), which was in turn consciously nurtured and exploited by New Right activists in the 1970s and 1980s (Viguerie and Franke 2004). By focusing on the dialogic relationship between quotidian news coverage and particular conservative political mobilizations, conservative news scholars are especially well positioned to further complicate the historiographical meta-​narrative of the modern conservative movement.

Conclusion As this chapter has demonstrated, it is not as though scholars have completely ignored right-​wing media or the myriad political cultural impacts of conservative news. Rather—​drawn to conservative media objects as means of exploring broader questions of press bias, media effects, propaganda analysis, and

 



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the history of the modern conservative movement—​scholars have tended to miss the forest for the trees. While the studies discussed in this chapter have illustrated the wide-​ranging implications of conservative news for the fields of journalism studies, political communication, and US political history, few have foregrounded the study of conservative news as an end unto itself. These seemingly disparate fields of study each explore component parts of the same object—​conservative news cultures. As we discussed in this book’s introduction, these historically contingent cultures result from consistent practices or patterns of meaning making that emerge between and among the sites of production, circulation, and consumption of conservative news. As the contributors to this volume have shown, conservative news itself is a variegated and plural object of analysis. It involves a seemingly endless array of individuals, organizations, rhetorical and narrative strategies, news-​gathering practices, ideologies, tastes, and aesthetics. It operates locally, regionally, nationally, even globally. It can be studied at the micro level of individual producers and consumers, the meso level of organizations and institutions, and the macro level of infrastructures and systems of meaning. The challenge of formally defining conservative news—​the effects and implications of which are deeply documented in the literatures surveyed in this chapter—​is the result of its neglect as an object in its own right. As scholars take up this book’s call to develop theories and research questions foregrounding conservative news, we expect both clarity and productive contention to ensue. A robust field of critical conservative news studies must build on the questions raised by the subfields of media and journalism studies, political science, and history discussed earlier—​but it must also transcend them. This book’s contributors have taken important steps in this direction. Shedding light on the role of conservative news in political identity formation, the construction of movement infrastructure, and shifts in political discourse, the chapters in this book have begun what we hope will be a sustained interdisciplinary focus on the production, consumption, and circulation of conservative news.

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Edwards, David, and David Cromwell. 2005. Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media. London: Pluto Press. Efron, Edith. 1971. The News Twisters. Los Angeles: Nash Pub. Efron, Edith. 1972. How CBS Tried to Kill a Book. Los Angeles: Nash Pub. Faris, Robert M., Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler. 2017. “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” Cambridge, MA: Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University. Feldman, Lauren, Edward W. Maibach, Connie Roser-​Renouf, and Anthony Leiserowitz. 2012. “Climate on Cable:  The Nature and Impact of Global Warming Coverage on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC.” International Journal of Press/​Politics 17 (1): 3–​31. Formisano, Ronald P. 1991. Boston Against Busing:  Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Gans, Herbert J. 1979. Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and Time. New York: Pantheon. Gans, Herbert J. 1985. “Are U.S. Journalists Dangerously Liberal?” Columbia Journalism Review 24 (4): 29–​33. Gary, Brett. 1999. The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press. Gibson, John. 2009. How the Left Swiftboated America: The Liberal Media Conspiracy to Make You Think George Bush Was the Worst President in History. New York: Harper Collins. Gillis, William. 2017. “The Anti-​Semitic Roots of the ‘Liberal News Media’ Critique.” American Journalism 34 (3): 262–​288. Gitlin, Todd. 1980. The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goldberg, Bernard. 2001. Bias:  A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. Chicago: Regnery. Gottfried, Jeffrey, Galen Stocking, and Elizabeth Grieco. 2018. “Partisans Remain Sharpley Divided in Their Attitudes About the News Media.” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Greenberg, David. 2008. “The Idea of ‘the Liberal Media’ and Its Roots in the Civil Rights Movement.” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 1 (2): 167–​186. Groseclose, Tim. 2011. Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hackett, Robert A. 1984. “Decline of a Paradigm? Bias and Objectivity in News Media Studies.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1 (3): 229–​259. Hall, Stuart. 2006. “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies.” In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture:  A Reader, edited by John Storey, 124–​ 155. London: Pearson. Hemmer, Nicole. 2016. Messengers of the Right:  Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hendershot, Heather. 2011. What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-​Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hendershot, Heather. 2016. Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line. New York: HarperCollins. Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. Hill, Rebecca. 2018. “A Hundred Years of Fake News.” American Quarterly 70 (2): 303–​313. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: New Press. Hofstadter, Richard. 1963. “The Pseudo-​Conservative Revolt (1955).” In The Radical Right: The New American Right, expanded and updated, edited by Daniel Bell, 75–​95. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

 

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CO N T R I B U TO R S

A. J.  Bauer is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New  York University and a research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. He holds a PhD in American Studies from NYU, and his work has appeared in American Journalism, Columbia Journalism Review, Social Text: Periscope, New Inquiry, and The Guardian. Lee Bebout is an associate professor at Arizona State University. His articles have appeared in Aztlán, MELUS, Latino Studies, and other scholarly journals. His book, Mythohistorical Interventions (Minnesota, 2011), examines how narratives of myth and history were deployed to articulate political identity in the Chicano movement and postmovement era. His second book, Whiteness on the Border (NYU Press, 2016), examines how representations of Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans have been used to foster whiteness and Americanness, or more accurately whiteness as Americanness. Alex DiBranco is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Yale University, and a graduate student affiliate at the Berkeley Center for Right-​Wing Studies. Her in-​progress dissertation looks at the US New Right movement infrastructure’s development from 1970 to 1997, a project shaped by network entrepreneurs, charismatic leaders, direct mail consultants, and rightist foundations that reverberates in the political arena today. She is conducting ongoing work analyzing the role of male supremacist ideology in right-​wing mobilizations (online and offline). DiBranco previously worked as communications director at Political Research Associates, and her writing has appeared in venues including The Nation, Alternet, Rewire, and Public Eye magazine.

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ibutors

Anthony DiMaggio is an assistant professor of political science at Lehigh University. He specializes in the study of political communication, social movements, and inequality. He has published six books, most recently Selling War, Selling Hope (SUNY Press, 2015)  and The Politics of Persuasion (SUNY Press, 2017). Dawn R.  Gilpin (PhD, Temple University) is an associate professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Her work focuses on mediated systems of communication and processes of collective identity construction across mediated platforms. In addition to numerous scholarly articles in journals and edited volumes, she coauthored Crisis Management in a Complex World (Oxford, 2008)  with Priscilla Murphy. Robert Greene II is an assistant professor of history at Claflin University. His main research interests are American intellectual history, the history of the post–​ World War II American South, and American political history. His dissertation studies the importance of Southern African American voters to the Democratic Party’s fragile post–​New Deal coalition after 1965. His work has appeared in the edited volume Navigating Souths: Transdisciplinary Explorations of a U.S. Region and in the journal Patterns of Prejudice. He has also published essays in Dissent, The Nation, Jacobin, Politico, and Scalawag. Julie B. Lane is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Boise State University, where she teaches courses in media studies and public relations. Her research focuses on the formation of political narratives by and about the news media during the mid-​twentieth century, including narratives involving the American Establishment, liberal media bias, the Cold War consensus, and Title IX. Her work has appeared in American Journalism, Journalism History, Communication & Sport, and Blue Review. Mark Major received his PhD in Political Science from Rutgers University and is the author of The Unilateral Presidency and the News Media: The Politics of Framing Executive Power (Palgrave, 2014). Anthony Nadler is an associate professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College and a research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. He is the author of Making the News Popular: Mobilizing U.S. News Audiences (University of Illinois Press, 2016). His writing has appeared in Journalism, The Communication Review, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Politics and Culture, and Wired, and elsewhere. He is a cofounder of teachingmedia.org and cofounding editor of the Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier.

 



Contributors

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Reece Peck is an assistant professor in the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island. He earned his PhD in Communication from the University of California San Diego and is the author of Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class (Cambridge, 2019). His work has appeared in Media, Culture & Society, in Journalism, and elsewhere. He also provides commentary on news and politics for news organizations, including New York magazine, the Washington Post, and the Agence France Presse. Angela Phillips is a professor of journalism studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author, with Eiri Elvestad, of Misunderstanding the News Audience: Seven Myths of the Social Media Era (Routledge, 2018). She is also the author of Journalism in Context (Routledge, 2014), the coauthor of Changing Journalism (Routledge, 2012), and the author of numerous chapters and papers on journalism. Victor Pickard is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. He has published numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, and he writes for popular outlets such as The Guardian, Huffington Post, The Nation, Jacobin, and The Atlantic. He has authored, coauthored, or coedited six books, including America’s Battle for Media Democracy, Media Activism, Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights, and After Net Neutrality: A New Deal for the Digital Age. Currently he is finishing a book on the political economy of digital journalism. Mark Ward Sr. (PhD, Clemson University) is an associate professor of communication at the University of Houston-​Victoria, Texas. His research on American evangelical culture and popular media has been published in numerous books, journals, and chapters, and he has been quoted by the New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg, Religion News Service, Associated Press, and other media outlets. He is a winner of the Clifford G.  Christians Ethics Research Award for The Electronic Church in the Digital Age:  Cultural Impacts of Evangelical Mass Media, and of the David R.  Maines Narrative Research Award and Religious Communication Association Article of the Year Award for his ethnographic research on evangelical culture. In 2018 he was named his institution’s scholar of the year.

 

 

INDEX

Note: Tables and figures are indicated by t and f following the page number For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. ABC (American Broadcasting Company), 30t, 116 abortion Catholic and Christian Right positions on, 131–​32,  133 Christian radio and, 28–​29, 30t, 32, 33t New Right and, 6, 123–​24, 133 Academy of Country and Western Music, 54 Accuracy in Media (AIM) Fairness Doctrine and, 116 Herman and Chomsky on, 1–​2 “liberal media” as target of, 3–​4, 116, 126, 227,  233–​34 New Empowerment Television (NET) and, 137 Adolph Coors Foundation, 129, 133–​34 Agnew, Spiro, 14, 169–​70, 227, 233–​34 Ailes, Roger, 51, 55–​56, 131, 137 Air1 radio network, 22 Allan, Stuart, 6 Alliance Defending Freedom, 32, 33t, 35t, 42 Alsop, Joseph and Stewart, 162–​63, 167 The Alternative, 126, 133–​34. See also American Spectator alt-​right movement, 70–​71, 187 America First Committee, 158–​59 American Business Consultants, 160–​61 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 127–​28 American Conservative Union (ACU) National Journalism Center and, 132, 134–​35 National Rifle Association and, 86 origins of, 125, 126 Viguerie and, 128–​29 American Enterprise Institute (AEI), 126–​28, 129 American Family Association (AFA), 22, 35t, 42 American Family News Network, 18, 25t, 33t

American Family Radio, 18, 22–​23, 24, 26t, 35t, 38 American Hunter magazine, 86–​87 American Jewish Committee, 115 American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC),  128–​29 American Mercury, 2–​3,  158–​59 American Opinion, 217, 220–​21, 222–​23 American Rifleman,  86–​87 Americans for Democratic Action, 162 American Spectator, 126, 129–​30, 133–​34, 135–​36 American Standard,  243–​44 America’s 1st Freedom, 86–​87, 89, 90, 91t, 92, 94, 97 America’s Newsroom (Fox News program), 49–​50 anti-​communism Christian Anti-​Communism Crusade and, 1,  242–​43 Christian radio and, 20–​21 Cold War rivalry and, 158 corporate libertarianism and, 110, 114 Counterattack newsletter and, 160–​61, 233 Evangelical Christians and, 3 John Birch society and, 1 “liberal media” charges as aspect of, 221, 223,  235–​36 National Review and, 124–​25, 159–​60, 161, 163–​64, 165,  181–​82 Antifa, 85 anti-​feminism “feminazi” epithet and, 10, 64 Limbaugh and, 64 New Right and, 133–​34 weaponized male victimhood as a source of, 10, 64, 68–​69, 70, 71, 74–​76, 77–​80

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256 I n d e

Apostolidis, Paul, 240–​41 Appalachian State University privilege controversy (2015), 72–​75,  78–​79 Armed & Fabulous (NRATV program), 93 Armed Forces Radio, 54 Atlanta Constitution, 163   Bakke, Allan, 77–​78, 79 Baldwin, James, 178, 182–​83 Bannon, Steve, 35t, 187 Baroody, William J., 126–​27 Baym, Geoffrey, 60 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Brexit vote (2016) and, 12, 141, 143, 148, 149, 150–​51, 152, 153 immigration issues covered by, 150–​51 impartiality and journalistic professionalism emphasized at, 12, 143, 148, 151, 152 status as Great Britain’s most popular and trusted news provider of, 143, 153 Bean, Lydia, 27–​28, 41 Beaverbrooke, Lord, 144 Bebout, Lee, 10 Beck, Glenn auto industry bailout and, 58–​59 Glenn Beck (television program), 49–​50, 57–​58 King invoked by, 174–​75 Restoring Honor Rally (2010) and, 174–​75,  185 “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” and, 50, 57–​58 Tea Party and, 58 “War on Christmas” and, 64 Bell, Daniel, 234, 242 The Bell Curve (Murray), 132 Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society,  237–​38 Berlet, Chip, 130–​31 The Bible Christian radio’s citations of, 28–​29, 35t “Christian worldview” and, 18–​19, 24 Evangelical Christians’ exegesis of, 10, 23–​24,  42 “inerrancy doctrine” and, 23–​24, 28, 42 Bill Whittle’s Hot Mic (NRATV program), 90, 91t,  93–​94 Black, Clint, 56 Black Lives Matter movement, 93, 175–​76, 192 Black Power movement, 178–​79 The Blaze (conservative news outlet), 64–​65,  72–​74 Blight, David, 176 Blue Book (FCC public service regulations document), 114 Bongino, Dan, 98 Booth v. Hvass, 79 Boyd, Bill, 54 Bozell Jr., Brent, 222–​23

x

Bradley Foundation, 133–​34, 135, 136 Breitbart, 171, 228–​29 Breitbart, Andrew, 4 Brexit vote (United Kingdom, 2016) BBC and, 12, 141, 143, 148, 149, 150–​51, 152, 153 British television broadcasters’ impact on, 147, 150–​51,  152 Conservative Party and, 145–​46, 148–​49, 151, 152 Daily Mail and, 143, 144, 146–​47, 150 Daily Mirror and, 144 economic issues and, 149–​50, 151 environmental issues and, 151 European Union report on British coverage of,  144–​45 The Express and, 143, 144, 146–​47, 149–​50, 151 history of British public opinion regarding the European Union and, 145 immigration issues and, 149, 150–​51 Kings College research on media coverage preceding,  149–​50 Loughborough Centre’s study of media coverage preceding, 146–​47, 149 nostalgia as factor in, 152 older voters and, 152 right-​wing establishment press and, 12, 141, 142–​43, 145–​47, 149, 152 (see also specific papers) social media and, 141, 146–​47, 150, 151, 152 The Sun and, 143, 144, 146–​47, 149–​50 The Telegraph and, 143, 144, 146–​47, 149, 150 younger voters and, 153 Brimelow, Peter, 64–​65 Broadcasting and the Bill of Rights (National Association of Broadcasters), 111 Broadcasting magazine, 111 Brock, David, 1–​2, 136 Brookings Institute, 123, 125–​28 Brooks, Garth, 47–​48, 50 Brown, Gordon, 148 Brown v. Board of Education, 223 Buchanan, Lacey, 35t Buchanan, Patrick, 52, 64, 126–​27, 134–​35, 227 Buckley, William F. affirmative action and, 185 American Conservative Union and, 125 American Spectator and, 129–​30 civil rights movement and, 175, 177–​78, 185 Dartmouth Review and, 134–​35 “The Establishment” criticized by, 13, 162, 165–​66,  168 Firing Line and, 125, 126, 132, 171, 227 God and Man at Yale and, 125, 158 Goldwater’s presidential campaign of 1964 and, 225 Human Events and, 220–​21

 



Index

John Birch Society and, 3 National Review and, 1–​2, 3, 124–​25, 159–​60, 161–​62, 168, 175, 177–​78, 216–​17, 222–​23 New York mayoral campaign (1965) of, 185 Rovere and, 168 on segregation, 177–​78 white supremacy and, 132–​33, 177–​78, 185,  222–​23 Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and, 125,  159–​60 Burnham, James, 159 Bush, George H.W., 116, 183–​84 Bush, George W., 48, 56, 195–​96   Caldwell, John, 60 Californians for Life, 32, 33t, 42 Callahan, Jessica, 241 Cam & Co. (NRA talk show), 86–​87, 90, 91t,  93–​94 Cameron, David, 145, 148 Campus Reform, 32, 33t, 72–​75,  77–​78 Canada, 19–​20,  27–​28 Cappella, Joseph, 1–​2, 237–​38 Caramanica, Jon, 55 Carmichael, Stokely, 178–​79 Carry Guard Daily (NRATV show), 90, 91t, 100 Carthage Foundation, 129, 136 Cash, Johnny, 53 Catholics, 19–​20,  131–​32 CBS (Columbia Broadcast System) editorial decisions at, 30t Fairness Doctrine and, 116 How CBS Tried to Kill a Book (Efron) and, 233 presidential election of 1964 and, 168–​70 radio stations owned by, 20 Thunder on the Right broadcast by, 1–​2 The Vanishing Family documentary (1987) and, 182 Cernovich, Mike, 70 Chadwick, Andrew, 85–​86 Chamberlain, John, 159, 168 Chambers, Whittaker, 158–​59, 220–​21 Chappell, David, 176–​77 “Check Your Privilege” campaign, 73–​74 Chicano movement, 64, 66 Childs, Marquis, 167 Chodorov, Frank, 125 A Choice Not an Echo (Schlafly), 224–​25 Chomsky, Noam, 1–​2 Christian Anti-​Communism Crusade, 1, 242–​43 Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), 18,  34–​38 Christian Crusade (television program), 20 Christianity Today magazine, 132 Christian libertarianism, 107 Christian radio. See also Evangelical Christians abortion and, 28–​29, 30t, 32, 33t

257

agenda-​setting power of, 18, 27–​28 anti-​Communism and,  20–​21 The Bible cited on, 28–​29, 35t call-​in talk format and, 21–​22 Christian Right and, 21 “Christian worldview” as a framework on, 18–​19, 23, 25t, 28–​29, 32–​34, 42 conservative talk radio’s crossovers with, 34 contemporary Christian music and, 22, 38 Evangelical Christians and, 10, 18 Fairness Doctrine and, 20–​21, 22–​23, 116 Federal Communications Commission and,  20–​21 Federal Radio Commission during early twentieth century and, 19–​20 First Amendment rights and, 19–​20 gay marriage and, 28–​29, 32 Goldwater and, 20–​21 higher education controversies and, 30t, 32, 33t, 42 immigration policy and, 29, 30t, 39t, 42 “liberal media” and, 28, 29, 32, 42 Muslims and, 33t, 39t ownership concentration in, 17–​18, 22 rhetorical community concept and, 24 Second Amendment and, 29, 42 social media presence of, 17–​18 Trump and, 29–​32, 30t, 33t, 34–​41, 35t, 39t, 42 Christian Right. See also Evangelical Christians abortion and, 131–​32, 133 Christian radio and, 21 Christian worldview and conservative political identity among, 41 direct mail and, 131–​32, 133 homosexuality opposed by, 133 New Right and, 129, 131–​32 parachurch groups and, 41 publications by, 132 Schaeffer’s role in politicizing, 131–​32 Christian worldview Christian radio and, 18–​19, 23, 25t, 28–​29, 32–​34,  42 Evangelical Christians’ political identity and, 10, 18–​19, 23, 28, 42–​43 federal welfare spending and, 28–​29 “inerrancy doctrine” and, 23–​24, 28 Second Amendment and, 28–​29 civil rights movement American collective memory regarding, 174–​75, 176–​77, 179–​80,  184 Black Power movement and, 178–​79 Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, 175, 178, 183–​84 communists and, 181–​82 conservative movement’s populist anti-​statism as response to, 52–​53, 178–​79, 186, 223–​24 conservatives’ appropriation of, 175–​76, 177, 179–​80, 182, 184

 

258 I n d e

civil rights movement (cont.) Fair Housing Act (Civil Rights Act of 1968) and,  176–​77 King assassination and, 176–​77 “long civil rights movement” thesis and, 177 media coverage of, 221 in Mississippi, 178–​79, 221–​22 National Review and, 13, 132–​33, 174–​75, 176, 177–​80, 185–​87,  223 New Right and, 177 Voting Rights Act of 1965 and, 178, 179–​80,  183–​84 Clinton, Bill, 29–​32, 136, 183 Clinton, Hillary, 29, 33t, 136, 203–​4, 205f CNN (Cable News Network) ideology among viewers of, 196–​97, 197f impact on viewers’ political views of, 13–​14, 194–​96,  204 perceptions of media bias among viewers of, 199f, 199–​200 polarization and, 13–​14, 196, 200f, 200–​1, 201t, 202–​3, 203f, 204, 205f,  206–​7 predictors of voters’ attitudes toward, 198f, 199 Trump and, 206–​7 Cold War, 67, 158, 178, 181–​82, 224, 243–​44. See also anti-​communism The College Fix,  72–​73 College Insurrection,  72–​73 Collegiate Network (CN), 134–​35 Columbia Journalism Review, 232 Commentators (NRATV program), 91t, 92, 93, 99 Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (CFSC),  127–​28 Communication, Culture & Critique journal,  232–​33 Concerned Women for America, 27–​28 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 115 Connell, Tula, 243–​44 Connor, Bull, 223 Conservative Book Club, 40–​41 Conservative Caucus, 128–​29 “conservative countersphere” concept, 214–​15, 219–​20, 223, 224–​25,  228–​29 Conservative Digest, 6, 128–​29 The Conservative Mind (Kirk), 158–​59 conservative news studies bridging of academic disciplines and, 214–​15, 232–​33, 239, 245 communicative discourse and, 218–​19, 226,  228–​29 “conservative countersphere” concept and, 214–​15, 219–​20, 223, 224–​25,  228–​29 coordinative discourse and, 218–​19, 228–​29 deep stories as a framework for analysis in, 240 discursive institutionalism and, 213–​14, 217, 228, 229 media effect research and, 239, 244–​45

x

propaganda as a thematic framework for, 236, 239, 245 Conservative Party (United Kingdom) Brexit vote (2016) and, 145–​46, 148–​49, 151, 152 divisions during Cameron’s leadership in, 145, 148, 151, 152 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), 93, 129 conservative talk radio. See also specific hosts and programs Christian radio’s crossovers with, 34 conservative counterpublics and, 227 Fox News’s ascendancy over, 4 “liberal media” as target of, 227–​28 popularity of, 191 propaganda as a framework for analyzing,  238–​39 Republican Party and, 214 Salem Media Group and, 38, 39t contemporary Christian music, 22, 38 Coolidge, Calvin, 19–​20 Coors, Joseph, 126, 127–​28, 131. See also Adolph Coors Foundation Corban, Kimberly, 93 Corbyn, Jeremy, 146, 147–​48 Cornell Review,  134–​35 corporate libertarianism anti-​communism and, 110, 114 contradictions in, 117 corporate propaganda and, 11–​12, 106, 109, 110,  117–​19 Fairness Doctrine and, 112, 113 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and, 110, 111, 112, 113 First Amendment and, 106, 109, 111 “free radio” and, 106, 111–​12, 113–​14 news conceived as commodity in, 11–​12, 106, 111,  118–​19 origin in the 1940s of, 110 public service model of media challenged by,  110–​11 social democratic vision of media and, 119–​20 Coughlin, Charles, 2–​3, 113, 238–​39 Coulter, Ann, 134–​35 Council for National Policy (CNP), 128–​29 Counterattack newsletter (American Business Consultants), 160–​61, 233 country music. See also specific musicians conservative media’s market expansion and, 50 Country Music Association and, 53 Fox News and, 10, 55–​57 Great Depression and the origins of, 54 Hannity and, 56–​57 national marketing of, 53 Nixon and, 47, 52, 53, 59–​60, 61 Obama and, 47–​48

 



Index

patriotism and, 48 populism and, 10, 52, 55 Republican Party and, 52, 53–​54 Southern identity and, 53 Trump and, 52 “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (the Angry American)” (Keith), 54–​55 Cowie, Jefferson, 47 Cox, Chris W., 90–​92 Coyne Jr., John R., 227 Crisis magazine, 138 critical discourse analysis (CDA), 89 Crouch, Ian, 48   Dacre, Paul, 144 The Daily Caller,  72–​73 Daily Express, see The Express Daily Mail (British newspaper) immigration issues covered in, 150 long-​time editor’s retirement at, 153 monthly audience for, 143 nationalist coverage of European Union affairs and, 145 Nazi Era and, 144 origins of, 144 pro-​Brexit views of, 143, 144, 146–​47, 150 Daily Mirror, 143, 144 The Daily Show,  47–​48 Daniels, Charlie, 56 Dartmouth Review, 126, 133–​35, 136, 137 Davidson, Clinton, 165–​66 Daybreak USA (radio show), 35t The Dennis Prager Show, 39t Depression Quest video game, 79–​80 deregulation of the media industry, 10, 17, 19, 22, 117–​18,  142 “Detroit” (Rich), see “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” (Rich) Devin-​Adair (publishing house), 217 Dewey, John, 166 Dewey, Thomas, 111 Diamond & Silk (YouTube personalities), 93–​94 DiBranco, Alex, 12 DiMaggio, Anthony, 13–​14, 217 direct mail communication alternative information networks and, 130–​31 Christian Right and, 131–​32, 133 culture wars issues emphasized in, 133–​34 fundraising via, 130–​31 member recruitment via, 131 New Right and, 3–​4, 123–​24, 125–​26, 130–​31,  133 Weyrich and, 3–​4, 127–​28 discursive institutionalism, 213–​14, 217, 228, 229 Dixie Chicks, 56 Dobbs, Lou, 64 Dobson, James, 35t, 131–​32, 241

259

Doyle, Richard, 70 Drudge Report, 4, 8, 171 Drummond, Roscoe, 167 D’Souza, Dinesh, 129, 135, 136 DuBois, W. E. B., 77 Duke lacrosse rape case (2006), 70   Eagle Forum, 3–​4, 116 echo chamber concept conservative media and, 193–​94, 196–​97, 200f, 204, 205f, 206, 207 “hostile media effect” and, 197–​99 Jamieson and Capella’s development of, 1–​2,  237–​38 media bias and, 193–​94 Educational Media Foundation (EMF) radio group, 22 Edwards, Cam, 93–​94. See also Cam & Co. (NRA talk show) Efron, Edith, 220–​21, 227, 233–​34 Eisenhower, Dwight, 168–​69 electronic church, 17–​18, 27–​28, 29. See also Christian radio Ellison, Keith, 32, 33t The Emerging Republican Majority (Phillips), 53 Empower the People (NRATV program), 93 Equal Rights Amendment, 3–​4, 131–​32 The Eric Metaxas Show, 39t “The Establishment.” See also “liberal media” Buckley and, 13, 162, 165–​66, 168 conformity purportedly engendered by, 161–​62 England and the origins of the term, 166 National Review and, 13, 124–​25, 157, 161–​62, 165, 167–​68,  170–​71 New Right and, 3–​4 presidential election of 1964 and, 168–​69 Rovere and, 168 European Union, see Brexit vote (United Kingdom, 2016) Evangelical Christians. See also Christian radio; Christian Right anti-​communism and, 3 Bible exegesis among, 10, 23–​24, 42 Bible knowledge as source of authority on non-​ biblical topics among, 42–​43 “Christian worldview” as political identity formulation among, 10, 18–​19, 23, 28, 42–​43 electronic church and, 17–​18, 27–​28, 29 First and Second Great Awakenings in United States and, 23–​24 Fox News and, 27–​28 individualism and, 28–​29 institutional infrastructure built during twentieth century by, 19, 25–​27 as largest religious tradition in United States,  17–​18 Scopes Monkey Trial (1925) and, 19

 

260 I n d e

Evangelical Christians (cont.) Scottish Enlightenment and, 23–​24 victimhood claims among, 78, 80 white supremacy and, 3 Evans, M. Stanton, 220–​21 Ewen, Stuart, 108–​9 The Express (British newspaper) Beaverbrook and, 144 immigration issues covered in, 150 monthly audience for, 143 nationalist coverage of European Union affairs and, 145 pro-​Brexit views of, 143, 144, 146–​47, 149–​50,  151 “Project Fear” headlines in, 149–​50   Facebook, 17–​18, 86–​87, 143 Face the Nation (CBS news program), 91t Facts Forum, 3, 159–​60, 242–​43 Fair Housing Act (Civil Rights Act of 1968),  176–​77 Fairlie, Henry, 166 Fairness Doctrine Christian radio and, 20–​21, 22–​23, 116 conservative champions of, 116 corporate libertarianism and, 112, 113 Federal Communication Commission’s repeal (1987) of, 4, 21, 116, 171 Federal Communications Commission’s enforcement (1949-​87) of, 114, 115–​16 Mayflower Doctrine as predecessor to, 113–​17 Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. Federal Communications Commission and, 20–​21 “fake news,” 117–​18 Falwell, Jerry, 131–​32 FamilyLife Today (radio program), 35t Family Research Council, 26t, 27–​28,  131–​32 Family Talk (radio program), 35t Farage, Nigel, 145–​46, 148, 151 Farrell, Warren, 70 The FBI and Martin Luther King (Garrow), 181 Feder, J. Lester, 51, 53 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) anti-​monopoly restrictions on radio ownership prior to 1996 and, 21–​22 Blue Book (public service regulations document) at, 114 Christian radio and, 20–​21 corporate libertarianism and, 110, 111, 112, 113 Fairness Doctrine (1949-​1987) implemented by, 114, 115–​16 Fairness Doctrine rescinded (1987) by, 4, 21, 116, 171 marketplace approach to media regulation at, 117 Mayflower Doctrine and, 113–​17 Reagan Administration and, 21, 116, 117, 171

x

Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. Federal Communications Commission and, 20–​21 World War II and, 20 Federal Council of Churches, 20 Federalist Society, 137 Federal Radio Commission (FRC), 19–​20, 113 “feminazis,” 10, 64 Feulner, Edwin, 126–​27, 129, 130–​31 Fields, Barbara J., 180 Fields, Karen E., 180 Fire and Fury (Wolff), 29–​32, 30t, 35t, 39t Firing Line (television program), 125, 126, 132, 171, 227 First Amendment Christian radio and, 19–​20 corporate libertarianism and, 106, 109, 111 corporate power and, 106 National Rifle Association and, 98 Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. Federal Communications Commission and, 21 social democratic vision of media and, 120 Fisher, Abigail, 77–​78, 79 Focus on the Family radio program, 18, 27–​28, 35t, 41, 131–​32, 241 Fones-​Wolf, Elizabeth,  108–​9 Ford Foundation, 123, 125–​27 “The Forgotten American” (Goldwater), 224–​25 Fox & Friends (television show), 5–​6, 64–​65 Fox News Ailes and, 55–​56, 131, 137 Appalachian State University privilege controversy (2015) and, 72–​75 commercial success of, 137 conservative counterpublics and, 217, 227 country music and, 10, 55–​57 (see also specific songs) deep stories as framework for analyzing, 241 editorial decisions at, 5–​6 Evangelical Christians and, 27–​28 “fair and balanced” slogan of, 131, 170–​71 ideology among viewers of, 196–​97, 197f impact on viewers’ political views of, 13–​14, 194–​96,  204 “liberal media” as target of, 227 movement-​based conservative news eclipsed by, 4 Murdoch and, 55 perceptions of media bias among viewers of, 199f, 199–​200 polarization and, 13–​14, 190, 196, 200f, 200–​3, 201t, 202f, 203f, 204–​7, 205f, 240 populism and, 10, 55–​56 predictors of voters’ attitudes toward, 198f, 199 propaganda as a thematic framework for studying,  237–​38 ratings success of, 191, 206, 227

 



Index

Republican Party voters and, 190, 214 Rich and, 10, 49–​50, 57–​58 “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” and, 10, 49–​50, 57, 61 tabloid aesthetics and, 55–​56 Trump and, 5–​6, 190, 204, 205f, 206–​7, 214,  228–​29 “War on Christmas” and, 64–​65 Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class (Peck), 55–​56 Fraser, Nancy, 215–​16, 217–​19 Free Congress Foundation, 128–​29, 137 Freedom’s Safest Place (NRATV channel), 91t, 92, 95 The Freeman journal, 158–​59 Free Press (publishing house), 136 “free radio,” 106, 111–​12, 113–​14   Gage, John Angelo, 74–​75 Gallagher, Margaret “Maggie,” 135 Gamergate controversy (2014), 79–​80 Gannett, Frank, 107 Garrow, David, 181–​82 gay rights, see homosexuality Gibson, John, 64–​65 Gilpin, Dawn, 11 Gingrich, Newt, 59, 116, 137 Ginny Simone Reporting (NRATV program), 91t, 92,  99–​100 God and Man at Yale (Buckley), 125, 158 Godwin, R. Kenneth, 131, 133 Goldwater, Barry Christian radio and, 20–​21 civil rights legislation opposed by, 184 “The Establishment” and, 168–​69 “The Forgotten American,” 224–​25 Human Events and, 220–​21 King on, 180, 184 “liberal media” and, 224, 225–​26, 244 movement conservatism and, 168–​69 National Review and, 224 New Right and, 125 presidential election of 1964 and, 125, 127–​28, 168–​69, 224, 225–​26, 244 right-​wing extremist groups and, 1 Gramsci, Antonio, 192 Grand Ole Opry, 53 Great Recession (2008-​10), 48–​49 Great Society programs, 182, 183–​84 Greenberg, David, 107, 162–​63, 169–​70, 221 Greene II, Robert, 13 Greenwood Morning Star, 222 Grindy, Matthew, 222–​23 Grossman, Dave, 100 The Guardian newspaper, 143 gun rights, see Second Amendment Guterman, Nathan, 238

261

Habermas, Jürgen, 215 Hackett, Robert, 235 Haggard, Merle, 50–​51, 53, 54–​55 Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, 177 The Hamilton Corner (radio program), 26t, 35t Hammer, Marion, 92 Hannity, Sean conservative counterpublics and, 217 country music and, 56–​57 Evangelical Christians and, 18 Hannity (television program) and, 49–​50, 57, 58, 59, 91t “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” and, 50, 57, 58 Tea Party and, 58, 59 Trump and, 214, 228–​29 Hargis, Billy James, 1, 3, 20–​21, 22–​23, 116, 217 Hariman, Robert, 47, 52 Hart, Jeffrey, 134–​35, 163–​64 Hartford Courant, 163 Harvey, Paul, 220–​21 Hasselbeck, Elisabeth, 64, 72–​74 Hawkins, A. W. R., 97 Hayek, Friedrich, 158–​59 Headlines, and What’s Behind Them,  160–​61 Hearst, William Randolph, 107, 112 Heatter, Gabriel, 2–​3 Helms, Jesse, 124–​25, 133, 181–​82 Hemmer, Nicole, 85–​86, 107–​8, 123, 170, 224–​25 Hennock, Frieda, 115 Herbert, Mike, 73 Heritage Foundation, 4, 127–​29, 130–​31, 137 Herman, Edward, 1–​2 Hill, Anita, 136–​37 hip-​hop music,  59–​60 Hochschild, Arlie, 241 Hofstadter, Richard, 67, 80, 242 Hoiles, Raymond Cyrus, 243–​44 homosexuality, 32, 48, 123–​24, 133–​34, 135 Hoover, Herbert, 19–​20 Horowitz, David, 64 HotAir (blog), 40–​41 Houck, Davis, 222–​23 House Republican Study Committee, 128–​29 How CBS Tried to Kill a Book (Efron), 233 How Should We Then Live? (Schaeffer), 131–​32 Huckabee, Mike, 34–​38 The Hugh Hewitt Show, 38, 39t Human Events (journal) America First Committee and, 158–​59 civil rights movement and, 222–​23 conservative counterpublics and, 217, 224–​25 conservative foundations’ support of, 126 establishment (1944) of, 158–​59 financial difficulties of, 171 John Birch Society and, 220–​21 “liberal media” and, 123, 124–​25, 160–​61, 168–​69, 220f, 220–​21, 225, 227, 235–​36

 

262 I n d e

Human Events (journal) (cont.) National Review and, 220–​21 presidential election of 1964 and, 225 Salem Media Company’s acquisition of, 40–​41 Viguerie and, 128–​29 Hunt, H. L., 1, 3, 217, 225–​26   Ideas Have Consequences (Weaver), 158–​59 Illiberal Education: The Politics of Sex and Race on Campus (D’Souza), 136 Illinois Family Institute, 32, 33t, 42 “Independence Day” (McBride), 56 Indiana University, 126, 129–​30 Ingraham, Laura, 134, 135, 137 The Insider (television program), 72–​73 Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA), 129, 132,  134–​35 Institute for Legislative Action (ILA), 89, 90, 91t, 92, 94, 99 Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), 238 Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), 123, 125, 126, 129 In These Times, 136 Iraq War, 48, 56, 195–​96 Irvine, Reed, 116, 227, 233 ITV (British broadcaster), 148   Jackson, Jesse, 175, 176–​77, 182–​83 Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, 1–​2, 237–​38 Janet Mefferd Live (radio program), 26t, 35t Janson, Chris, 52 Jay Sekulow Live (radio program), 18, 34–​38, 35t J. M. Foundation, 129 The Joe Walsh Show (radio program), 39t John Birch Society, 1, 3, 132–​33, 159–​60, 220–​21,  242–​43 Johnson, Lyndon B., 52–​53, 125, 182–​84 Johnson, Michael, 35t Johnson, Olin, 221–​22 Judd, Naomi, 57 Justice with Judge Jeanie, 91t   Kaltenborn, H. V., 2–​3 Keeley, Joseph, 227 Keith, Toby, 48, 52, 54–​55, 56 Kelly, Megyn, 57 Kemp, Jack, 134–​35 Kendall, Willmoore, 159, 163–​65, 167–​68 Keyes, Alan, 184 Khan, Imran, 70–​72, 74–​76, 77–​79 Kid Rock, 52 Kilpatrick, James, 178, 220–​21, 222–​23, 225 Kimmel, Michael, 67–​68, 77 King, Alveda, 174–​75 King, Bernice, 187 King, Jr., Martin Luther America’s collective memory of, 175

x

assassination of, 176–​77 Beck’s invocation of, 174–​75 capitalism critiqued by, 187 communists and, 181–​82 conservatives’ appropriation of, 175, 182,  184–​86 March on Washington (1963) and, 174,  185–​86 Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and, 175, 176–​77,  181 National Review and, 13, 175, 179–​80, 181–​82,  185–​87 Republican Party and, 180 Trump and, 187 Vietnam War and, 187 on white conservative and moderates, 180 King, Mike, 77 King, Rodney, 182–​84 Kintz, Linda, 240–​41 Kirk, Russell, 158–​59, 220–​21 K-​LOVE radio network, 22 Kopel, Dave, 93–​94 Kristofferson, Kris, 49–​50 Kristol, Irving, 129–​30, 132 Kristol, William, 129–​30 Kruse, Kevin, 107 Ku Klux Klan, 134, 158   Labour Party (United Kingdom), 144, 148 La Chappelle, Peter, 54 Ladd, Jonathan, 225 LaHaye, Tim, 131–​32 Lakoff, George, 97 Lane, Julie, 13, 124–​25 LaPierre, Wayne, 86, 90–​92, 91t, 93, 94 The Larry Elder Show (radio program), 39t Larson, Bob, 21–​22 Lasky, Victor, 220–​21 Las Vegas mass shooting (2017), 90–​92, 94 Lawyers Guild, 115 Lee, Alfred McClung, 238 Lee, Elizabeth Briant, 238 Lee, Hiram, 49 Levendusky, Matthew, 240 Levin, Mark, 217 Lewis, Fulton Jr., 2–​3, 4–​5, 216 LGBTQ equality, 66–​67, 73–​74, 174 “liberal media.” See also “The Establishment”; media bias Accuracy in Media organization and, 3–​4, 116, 126, 227, 233–​34 Agnew and, 227, 233–​34 anti-​communism as factor leading to charges of, 221, 223, 235–​36 Christian radio and, 28, 29, 32, 42 conservative counterpublics and, 216–​17 discursive institutionalism and, 213–​14, 219

 



Index

early academic studies attempting to document,  234–​35 emergence during 1960s of concept of, 219–​20, 228, 233 Goldwater and, 224, 225–​26, 244 Human Events and, 123, 124–​25, 160–​61, 168–​ 69, 220f, 220–​21, 225, 227, 235–​36 National Review and, 13, 123, 157, 161, 162–​65, 167–​68, 170–​71, 224,  235–​36 National Rifle Association (NRA) and, 95–​96, 97–​98,  101t New Right and, 3–​4, 125–​26 Nixon and, 14, 226–​27, 228 populism and, 107 public opinion regarding, 190–​91, 199f, 199–​ 200, 206–​7,  227–​28 racism as factor leading to charges of, 221, 223 Trump’s complaints regarding, 206–​7 Wallace and, 169–​70 Libertarianism. See also Christian libertarianism; corporate libertarianism Christian libertarianism and, 107 National Review and, 159–​60, 163–​64, 186 Liberty Fund, 134–​35 Lichter, S. Robert and Linda, 234–​35 Life Line (Hunt), 3 Lilly, Ruth, 129–​30 Lilly Endowment, 129–​30 Limbaugh, Rush anti-​feminism of, 64 commercial success of, 137 conservative counterpublics and, 217 conservatives depicted as outsiders by, 171 criticisms of, 4–​5 Evangelical Christians and, 18 Fairness Doctrine repeal and the rise of, 4 Hill-​Thomas hearings (1991) and, 136 “liberal media” as a target of, 227–​28 low-​brow tone of, 6 propaganda as a framework for analyzing,  238–​39 ratings success of, 227 Lippmann, Walter, 162–​63, 165, 167, 237 Littler, Laurel, 72–​73, 74–​75 Loesch, Dana, 97–​98 Los Angeles Riots (1992), 175, 182–​84 Los Angeles Times, 237 Love at First Shot (NRATV program), 91t, 92, 93 Lowenthal, Leo, 238 Lowndes, Joseph, 85, 87–​88, 103 Lowry, Rich, 135   Maddoux, Marlin, 21–​23 Maines, Natalie, 56 Major, Mark, 14, 170, 190 Malkin, Michelle, 4 Manion, Clarence, 3, 158–​59, 217, 220–​21, 225

263

Manion Forum (radio program), 123, 126, 158–​59,  160–​61 Manufacturing Consent (Herman and Chomsky),  1–​2 Mao Zedong, 165 March on Washington (1963), 174, 175, 178,  185–​86 March on Washington Fiftieth Anniversary March (2013), 175, 185–​86 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting (2018), 90, 94–​95, 100 Mayflower Doctrine, 113–​17 Maynard, Micheline, 49–​50 McBride, Martina, 56 McCain, John, 49 McCarthyism, 3, 160–​61, 242 McCormick, Robert, 2–​3, 4–​5, 107, 112 McGirr, Lisa, 224–​25, 243–​44 McIntire, Carl, 3, 20–​21, 22–​23, 116 McKenna Foundation, 129 Meagher, Richard, 137 media bias. See also “liberal media” “balance” as central concept in, 235 echo chamber effect and, 193–​94 in favor of government, 191–​92 in favor of market-​based capitalism, 191–​92 in favor of presidents, 191–​92 in favor of Trump supporters, 192 hegemonic bias and, 192–​93 “hostile media effect” and, 197–​200, 235–​36 protest movements and, 192 public opinion regarding, 191, 194–​96, 199f, 199–​200 right-​wing media and, 193–​94 Tea Party and, 192 Mediacracy (Phillips), 234 The Media Elite: America’s New Powerbrokers (Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter), 234 Media Matters for America, 1–​2 Media Research Center, 3–​4 Mehlman, Ken, 185 men’s rights activists, 64, 66, 69, 75–​77, 78–​79 Meredith, James, 178–​79 Messengers of the Right (Hemmer), 107–​8, 123 Metaska, Tanya, 92 Meyer, Frank American Conservative Union and, 125 American Spectator and, 129–​30 “The Establishment” criticized by, 165–​68 National Review and, 159 The Michael Douglas Show (television program), 55 The Michael Medved Show (radio program), 39t The Mike Gallagher Show (radio program), 38, 39t Miller, Carolyn, 24–​25, 28–​29 Miller, Edward, 224 Miller, Justin, 111, 112, 115–​16 Miller, Stephen, 29–​32, 39t, 70

 

264 I n d e

Mills, C. Wright, 234 “The Misandry Bubble” (Khan), 70–​73, 74–​76 Mises, Ludwig von, 220–​21 Mississippi civil rights mobilization (1960s) in, 178–​79,  221–​22 freedom of conscience law in, 30t, 32, 33t, 35t Till murder in, 223 M. J. Murdock Foundation, 129 Moffitt, Benjamin, 51–​52 Moral Majority, 128–​29 A More Beautiful and Terrible History (Theoharis),  176–​77 Moreton, Bethany, 107 Mother Jones, 136 MSNBC ideology among viewers of, 196–​97, 197f, 199,  202–​3 impact on viewers’ political views of, 13–​14, 194–​96,  204 perceptions of media bias among viewers of, 199f, 199–​200 polarization and, 13–​14, 196, 200f, 200–​1, 201t, 202–​3, 203f, 204, 205f, 206–​7, 240 predictors of voters’ attitudes toward, 198f, 199 Trump and, 206–​7 Murdoch, Rupert, 55–​56, 137, 144, 214 Murphy, Steve, 57 Murray, Charles, 132, 183–​84 Murrow, Edward, 165 Muslims, 39t, 99, 101t Mutual Broadcasting System, 20 The Myth of Male Power (Farrell), 70   Nash, George, 159, 161, 242–​43 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 178–​79, 185,  222–​23 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), 110, 111–​12, 113,  115–​16 National Association of Manufacturers, 110 National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), 128–​29, 133 National Empowerment Television (NET), 137 National Interest, 132, 136, 137 National Journalism Center (NJC), 132, 134–​35 National Organization for Marriage (NOM), 135 National Religious Broadcasters, 21 National Review anti-​communism and, 124–​25, 159–​60, 161, 163–​64, 165,  181–​82 Black Power movement and, 178–​79 Buckley’s role at, 1–​2, 3, 124–​25, 159–​60, 161–​62, 168, 175, 177–​78, 216–​17, 222–​23 civil rights movement and, 13, 132–​33, 174–​75, 176, 177–​80, 185–​87, 223

x

conservative counterpublics and, 217, 224–​25,  227 conservative foundations’ support of, 126 cultural populism criticized in, 53–​54 Dartmouth Review and, 134–​35 “elite populism” and, 170 “The Establishment” and, 13, 124–​25, 157, 161–​62, 165, 167–​68,  170–​71 financial difficulties of, 167–​68, 171 Goldwater’s presidential campaign (1964) and, 224 Great Society programs and, 183–​84 Human Events and, 220–​21 intellectual tone of, 4, 6 King and, 13, 175, 179–​80, 181–​82, 185–​87 launch (1955) of, 3, 158, 159 “The Liberal Line” column in, 163–​64, 165–​66 “liberal media” and, 13, 123, 157, 161, 162–​65, 167–​68, 170–​71, 224,  235–​36 Libertarianism and, 159–​60, 163–​64, 186 Los Angeles Riots (1992) and, 182–​84 Lowry and, 135 March on Washington (1963) and, 178 Meredith assassination attempt (1966) and,  178–​79 movement conservatism’s origins and, 124–​25,  159–​60 New York Times criticized by, 162–​63, 165,  168–​69 “The Printed Word” column in, 163 Reagan and, 129 sale of subscription list to foundations by, 131 sanctity of Southern culture championed by,  178–​79 Sharpton and, 186–​87 Welch denounced (1962) by, 1–​2 white supremacy and, 177–​79, 186, 222–​23 National Rifle Association (NRA) American Conservative Union and, 86 campaign finance laws and, 86 as coherent mediasphere, 11, 84–​85, 102–​3 communities of color and, 92–​93, 94 criminal justice system and, 99–​100 firearm manufacturers and, 100 First Amendment and, 98 frontier masculinity and, 92, 94 homogeneous community discourse among, 96, 100, 101t hybridity of, 85, 94 international terrorism and, 99 “the left” and, 97, 98, 101t “liberal media” and, 95–​96, 97–​98, 101t magazines published by, 11, 86–​87, 90, 91t, 92, 94, 97 mass shootings and, 90–​92, 94–​95 membership numbers for, 84 Muslims and, 99, 101t

 



Index

National Football League kneeling controversy (2017) and, 95 National School Shield Program and, 94–​95 New Empowerment Television (NET) and, 137 New Right and, 3–​4, 128–​29 New York Times and,  97–​98 NRA.org website of, 86–​87, 88–​89, 90–​94, 91t NRATV and, 84–​85, 86–​87, 88–​89, 90, 91t, 92, 93, 94–​97 (see also specific programs) populism and, 11, 96, 100, 103 power and control themes at, 98, 101t Republican Party and, 84 Second Amendment and, 3–​4, 85, 96, 100–​2, 101t, 103 self-​reliance as freedom for, 97 social media accounts of, 11, 84–​85, 86–​87, 90 Steinle trial (2017) and, 95–​96 threat modality and, 96–​97, 99, 101t Trump and, 96 women’s membership in, 92 National Right-​to-​Work Committee,  127–​28 National School Shield Program, 94–​95 National Youth Front (NYF), 72–​73, 74–​75 The Nation magazine, 136 NBC (National Broadcasting Company), 20, 30t, 39t, 116 neoconservatives, 6, 129, 132 neo-​Nazi groups,  74–​75 Nerone, John, 7 New Criterion, 132, 136 New Deal accusations of communism regarding, 160–​61 conservative opposition to, 2–​3, 158, 237,  242–​43 social democratic framework of, 106, 110 New Empowerment Television (NET), 137 New Energy (NRATV show), 93 New Left, 133–​34 New Right abortion and, 6, 123–​24, 133 anti-​feminism and,  133–​34 campus publications and, 126, 133–​35 Christian Right and, 129, 131–​32 civil rights movement and, 177 conservative foundations supporting, 12, 126–​29, 132, 133–​35, 136, 137 direct mail communication and, 3–​4, 123–​24, 125–​26, 130–​31,  133 homosexuality opposed by, 123–​24, 133–​34,  135 “liberal media” and, 3–​4, 125–​26 populism and, 4 Reagan and, 129, 134–​35 single-​issue groups and, 3–​4 Television News Inc. (TVN) and, 128–​29, 131 think tanks and, 12, 125–​26 Weyrich as a key figure in, 123–​24, 126–​29

265

white supremacy and, 134, 135 The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead (Viguerie), 131 News Corporation, 55, 145 The News Twisters (Efron), 233 Newsweek,  162–​63 New York Daily News, 163 New York Post, 55 New York Times civil rights movement and, 221 “The Establishment” and, 167 “liberal media” charges against, 233 National Review’s criticisms of, 162–​63, 165,  168–​69 National Rifle Association (NRA) and, 97–​98 predictors of voters’ attitudes toward, 198f, 199 Nisbet, Robert, 158–​59 Nixon, Richard country music and, 47, 52, 53, 59–​60, 61 “liberal media” and, 14, 226–​27, 228 “Silent Majority” and, 50–​51, 52, 53, 169–​70 “Southern Strategy” and, 32–​34, 185 television appearances by, 51 white ethnics and, 53 Noir (NRATV program), 91t, 92, 93 Noir, Colion, 93 None Dare Call It Treason (Stormer), 224–​25 Northcliffe, Lord, 144 Novak, Michael, 182 NRA Family (NRATV program), 86–​87   Obama, Barack approval ratings data regarding, 202–​3, 203f auto industry bailout (2009) and, 59 conservatives’ response to, 185–​86 country music and, 47–​48 Great Recession stimulus program and, 50, 57 hip-​hop music and, 59–​60 inaugural concert (2009) of, 47–​48 racial politics in the United States and, 59, 60 Occupy Wall Street Movement, 93, 192 Okafor, Antonia, 93–​94 “Okie from Muskogee” (Haggard), 50–​51, 54–​55 Olin Foundation, 129, 133–​35, 136 Orange County (California), 159–​60, 224–​25,  243–​44 O’Reilly, Bill, 51, 57, 60, 64–​65, 68, 238–​39 Ostiguy, Pierre, 87   Parker, Dorothy, 2–​3 Parkland (Florida) shooting (2018), 90, 94–​95,  100 Parton, Dolly, 56 patriarchy counterpublics as response to, 215 Khan’s defense of, 75–​76 men’s rights movement and, 74–​75, 76–​77

 

266 I n d e

patriarchy (cont.) populism and, 87–​88 systematic power and control in, 98, 101t US culture and, 67 victimization of women and men in, 76–​77 Patrick, Brian, 85, 86, 103 Patriot Profiles (NRATV program), 91t, 92 PBS (Public Broadcasting System), 126, 132 Peck, Reece, 10, 55–​56, 60, 241 Pecknold, Diane, 52, 53 Pegler, Westbrook, 2–​3 Pence, Mike, 59 Perkins, Tony, 26t, 35t Perlstein, Rick, 216–​17, 227–​28 Phillips, Angela, 12 Phillips, Kevin, 52, 53, 234 Phillips-​Fein, Kim, 108, 214 Phyllis Schlafly Report,  131–​32 Pickard, Victor, 11–​12 Plain Talk, 2–​3,  160–​61 Point of View (radio program), 21–​22 polarization affective polarization and, 240 CNN and, 13–​14, 196, 200f, 200–​1, 201t, 202–​3, 203f, 204, 205f,  206–​7 Columbia Journalism Review on, 232 deregulation of the media industry and, 142 Fox News and, 13–​14, 190, 196, 200f, 200–​3, 201t, 202f, 203f, 204–​7, 205f, 240 MSNBC and, 13–​14, 196, 200f, 200–​1, 201t, 202–​3, 203f, 204, 205f, 206–​7, 240 right-​wing news audiences versus left-​wing news audiences and, 13–​14 Pollenta, Francesca, 241 populism anti-​statism and, 88 authoritarianism and, 98, 101t conservative news cultures and, 7–​8 country music and, 10, 52, 55 discursive features of, 87 “elite populism” and, 170 Fox News and, 10, 55–​56 freedom and, 97 “liberal media” and, 107 National Rifle Association (NRA) and, 11, 96, 100, 103 New Right and, 4 patriarchy and, 87–​88 personalized nature of politics in, 87 tabloid journalism and, 55–​56 white supremacy and, 87–​88 Powell, Lewis, 126–​27 presidential election of 1964 “The Establishment” and, 168–​69 “liberal media” and, 225–​26 movement conservatism and, 244 Republican National Convention of 1964 and,  168–​69 Wallace and, 169–​70

x

presidential election of 2016 “liberal media” as a target of criticism in,  227–​28 news coverage of, 147, 204 Republican National Convention and, 52 Russian interference in, 29, 147 Professor Watchlist, 64 The Progressive,  181–​82 Proud to Be an Okie (La Chappelle), 54 Public Interest, 132, 136 public service journalism, 119   The Quest for Community (Nisbet), 158–​59 Quinn, Zoë, 79–​80   Race and Reunion (Blight), 176 “racecraft,” 180 Radio America network, 132 Ramsey, Dave, 35t Rand, Ayn, 160, 220–​21 The Rape of the Male (Doyle), 70 Raso, Dom, 95, 99 Rather, Dan, 221–​22 Readers’s Digest,  2–​3 Reagan, Ronald Christian radio and, 26t Dartmouth Review and, 134–​35 Federal Communications Commission and, 21, 116, 117, 171 federal spending levels under, 183 Human Events and, 220–​21 Martin Luther King holiday and, 181 movement conservatism and the election of 1980 and, 244 New Right and, 129, 134–​35 Reason magazine, 132 The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Theoharis),  176–​77 Red Channels,  160–​61 Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. Federal Communications Commission,  20–​21 Red Scare (1920s), 158 Red Scare (1950s), 3, 160–​61, 242 RedState (blog), 40–​41 Regnery, Henry, 3 Regnery Publishing, 40–​41, 123, 217 Religious Roundtable, 128–​29 Republican Party. See also specific politicians auto industry bailout (2009) and, 59 conservative talk radio and, 214 country music and, 52, 53–​54 distrust of the media and, 157, 235–​36 Fox News and, 190, 214 King on, 180 National Rifle Association (NRA) and, 97 Republican National Convention (1964) and,  168–​69 Republican National Convention (2016) and, 52 “Southern Strategy” and, 185

 



Index

Restoring Honor Rally (2010), 174–​75, 185 Rich, John. See also “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” (Rich) Fox News and, 10, 49–​50, 57–​58 McCain and, 49 Tea Party movement and, 49–​50 Trump inaugural performance (2017) by, 52 Riesman, David, 234 Ritter, Tex, 54 The Road to Serfdom (Hayek), 158–​59 Roberts-​Miller, Patricia,  68–​69 Robertson, Pat, 131–​32 Robin, Corey, 6 Robinson, David, 56 Roediger, David, 77 Rogin, Michael, 67, 80 Romney, Mitt, 30t, 59 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 107 Rossiter, Clinton, 160 Rothermere, Lord, 144 Rothman, Stanley, 234–​35 Rourke, Mickey, 49–​50 Rove, Karl, 129–​30 Rovere, Richard, 168 Rubenstein, Ed, 183 Rumsfeld, Donald, 56 Rusher, William American Conservative Union and, 125 American Specator and, 129–​30 anti-​communism and, 161 Dartmouth Review and, 134–​35 Goldwater presidential campaign (1964) and, 168–​69,  224 National Review and, 161, 216–​17, 224 Young Americans for Freedom and, 159–​60 Rush Limbaugh Show, see Limbaugh, Rush Rustin, Bayard, 178–​79, 181–​82 Ryan, J. Harold, 106   Salem Media Group conservative talk radio and, 38, 39t contemporary Christian music and, 38 Human Events and, 40–​41 news programming and, 18, 22, 32 print media and, 38 promotional statement of, 25t Regnery Publishing and, 40–​41 Salem Web Network, 17–​18, 38 status as one of the largest radio groups in United States of, 22–​23, 38 talk shows produced by, 22 Townhall Media and, 40–​41 Trump and, 38–​41, 39t Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, 129 Sandy Hook Massacre (2012), 94–​95 Sandy Rios in the Morning, 35t Santa Ana Daily Register,  243–​44 Sarkeesian, Anita, 79–​80 Scaife, Richard Mellon, 126

267

Scaife, Sarah, 129 Scaife Family Charitable Trust, 127, 129–​30,  133–​34 Schaeffer, Francis, 131–​32 Schlafly, Phyllis, 3–​4, 116, 131–​32, 168–​69,  224–​25 Schlamm, William, 159 Schlesinger, Arthur, 162 Schlosberg, Justin, 149 Schmidt, Vivien, 217–​19 Schneider, Gregory L., 129–​30 Schudson, Michael, 7 Schwartz, Fred, 1 Scopes Monkey Trial (1925), 19 Second Amendment Christian worldview and, 28–​29 communities of color and, 92–​93 gun safety legislation and, 84 identity politics and, 11 National Rifle Association and, 3–​4, 85, 96, 100–​2, 101t, 103 secular humanism, 23–​24, 131–​32 segregation black male and white female sexuality as motivation for, 66 Buckley on, 177–​78 conservative media’s coverage of, 123, 132–​33, 164,  222–​23 conservatives’ support for, 180 mainstream media coverage of, 221–​22, 223, 224 public schools and, 66, 223 white supremacy and, 177–​78 Sekulow, Jay, 34–​38 Seldes, George, 2–​3, 160–​61 The Selling Sound (Pecknold), 53 Senate Steering Committee, 128–​29 September 11 terrorist attacks (2001), 48 Sevareid, Eric, 1 Shapiro, Ben, 4 Sharpton, Al, 175, 186–​87 Shields, Jon A., 133 Shooting Illustrated,  86–​87 Shooting Sports USA,  86–​87 Shuler, Robert “Fighting Bob,” 19–​20 Shulman, Beth, 136 “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” (Rich) Academy of Country Music Awards performance (2009) of, 58 audience reactions to, 49 auto workers depicted in, 48, 59 Fox News and, 10, 49–​50, 57, 61 leftist content in, 49, 50, 54, 55, 57–​58, 59 live performances on radio of, 49 “Okie from Muskogee”compared to, 54–​55 populism and, 49 Tea Party movement and, 49–​50 Wall Street bailouts decried by, 48, 57–​58

 

268 I n d e

“Silent Majority” (Nixon), 50–​51, 52, 53, 169–​70 Simon, William E., 129 Sinclair, Upton, 237 Sivek, Susan Currie, 171 Skrentny, John, 52–​53 Sky TV (British broadcaster), 149 Smith, Andrea, 75–​76 Smith, Norman, 148 Smoot, Dan, 217 Sobran, Joseph, 181–​82 social democratic vision of media, 119–​20 social media. See also specific platforms Brexit vote (2016) and, 141, 146–​47, 150, 151, 152 Christian radio and, 17–​18 “fake news,” 118 men’s rights movement and, 70–​71 National Rifle Association and, 11, 84–​85, 86–​87,  90 white supremacy and, 70–​71 Sokolsky, George, 2–​3 Soros, George, 93 “Southern Strategy” (Nixon), 32–​34, 185 Soviet Union, 158, 163, 165, 181. See also Cold War The Spectator, 166 Spencer, Richard, 70 Spillman, Daniel, 129–​30, 133–​34 Stand with Us organization, 32, 33t Starbucks, 64–​65,  75–​76 Starnes, Todd, 38 Starr Foundation, 129, 133–​34 Steinle, Kate, 95–​96 Stevenson, Adlai, 166 Stewart, Jon, 47, 48, 50 Stinchfield (NRATV program), 90, 91t, 94, 95–​96,  97–​98 Stormer, John, 224–​25 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),  222–​23 Students in Free Enterprise, 242–​43 Sugrue, Thomas, 52–​53 The Sun (British newspaper) immigration issues covered in, 150 monthly audience figures for, 143 Murdoch and, 144 nationalist coverage of European Union affairs and, 145 pro-​Brexit views of, 143, 144, 146–​47, 149–​50 “Project Fear” headlines in, 149–​50 Sutherland Springs mass shooting (Texas, 2017),  94–​95   Talk Radio, see conservative talk radio Talk-​Back with Bob Larson (radio program), 21–​22 Taylor, Henry J., 2–​3 Tea Party movement

x

Beck and, 58 Boston Tea Party (1773) and, 177n.2 Hannity and, 58, 59 Hochschild’s study of, 241 media coverage of, 192 Rich and, 49–​50 “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” and, 49–​50 Telecommunications Act of 1996, 22, 38 The Telegraph (British newspaper), 143, 144, 146–​ 47, 149, 150 Television News Inc. (TVN), 128–​29, 131 Texas Public Policy Foundation, 32, 33t Theoharis, Jeanne, 176–​77 Thernstrom, Abigail and Stephan, 185–​86 This Is My Cause (television program), 91t, 92 Thomas, Clarence, 136–​37 Thrift, Bryan Hardin, 124–​25 Thunder on the Right (documentary), 1–​2 Till, Emmett, 222–​23 Time,  162–​63 Toledano, Ralph de, 162, 225 Townhall, 4, 40–​41 Trammell, Niles, 111 Travis, Randy, 56 Trinity Broadcasting Network, 34–​38 Trinity United Methodist Church, South, v. Federal Radio Commission,  19–​20 Trump, Donald J. Christian radio and, 29–​32, 30t, 33t, 34–​41, 35t, 39t, 42 country music and, 52 Farage compared to, 146 Fox News and, 5–​6, 190, 204, 205f, 206–​7, 214,  228–​29 Hannity and, 214, 228–​29 inauguration (2017) of, 52 King commemoration (2018) and, 187 “liberal media” complaints of, 206–​7 National Rifle Association, 96 presidential election of 2016 and, 204, 205f Salem Media Group and, 38–​41, 39t Twitter and, 5–​6, 146, 228–​29 Twentieth Century Reformation Hour, 20 Twitter, 5–​6, 86–​87, 146–​47, 150, 228–​29 Tyrrell, R. Emmett, 129–​30, 133–​34   UK Independence Party (UKIP), 145–​46, 148, 151 United Auto Workers (UAW), 49, 59, 115 University of San Francisco, 73–​74 USA Radio network, 18, 22–​23, 25t, 29–​32, 30t, 35t Utley, Freda, 159   Valizadeh, Daryush “Roosh V,” 70 The Vanishing Family documentary, 182 victimhood

 



Index

aggrieved entitlement and, 67–​68, 69, 77 anti-​feminism motivated by, 10, 64, 68–​69, 70, 71, 74–​76,  77–​80 Christians’ claims of, 65, 75–​76, 77, 80 Duke lacrosse rape case (2006) and, 70 loss of power and, 10, 68–​69, 75–​76, 77 men’s rights activists and, 64, 66, 69, 75–​77,  78–​79 “oppression Olympics” and, 75–​76 policies justified through reference to, 69, 79 projection and, 68–​69 public performances of, 69 shared identity and, 10, 69, 78–​79 twentieth-​century liberation struggles and,  66–​67 “War on Christmas” and, 10, 64–​66, 75–​76 weaponized victimhood and, 10, 64, 65–​69, 70, 74–​75, 77–​78,  80–​81 white supremacy motivated by, 10, 64, 65–​66, 70, 72–​75, 77–​78, 79, 80 Viereck, Peter, 160 Vietnam War, 54–​55, 123, 124–​25, 174, 187 Viguerie, Richard, 3–​5, 126, 127–​29, 131 VivaLaManosphere (website), 70 Voice of Freedom Committee, 2–​3 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 178, 179–​80, 183–​84   Waking from the Dream (Chappell), 176–​77 Walker, Scott, 192 Wallace, George, 169–​70 Wallbuilders Live! radio program, 35t Wall Street banks, 48, 57 Wall Street Journal, 1–​2, 4, 135, 217 Wal-​Mart,  243–​44 Ward Sr., Mark, 10 “War on Christmas,” 10, 64–​66, 75–​76 War on Poverty programs, 182, 183–​84 Washington Post, 162–​63, 167, 233 Washington Watch radio program, 18, 26t, 35t Waters, Maxine, 182–​83 Wayne Allyn Root Show (radio program), 35t weaponized victimhood, see under victimhood Weaver, Richard, 158–​59 Weekly Standard, 129–​30, 217, 227 Welch, Robert, 1–​2, 160 Weyrich, Paul Christian Right and, 129 direct mail campaigns and, 3–​4, 127–​28 Heritage Foundation and, 127–​29

269

New Right’s origins and, 123–​24, 126–​29 Television News Inc. and, 131 Thomas-​Hill hearings (1991) and, 137 White, Paula, 34–​38 White, Theodore, 168–​69 white supremacy aggrieved entitlement and, 67–​68 Appalachian State University privilege controversy (2015) and, 72–​75, 78–​79 Evangelical Christians and, 3 mainstreaming of, 75 National Review and, 177–​79, 186, 222–​23 National Youth Front and, 72–​73, 74–​75 neo-​Nazi groups and, 74–​75 New Right and, 134, 135 populism and, 87–​88 “responsible conservatism” and, 12–​13 social and psychological benefits conferred through, 77 social media and, 70–​71 systematic power and control in, 98, 101t Wallace presidential campaign (1964) and,  169–​70 weaponized victimhood as a source of, 10, 64, 65–​66, 70, 72–​75, 77–​78, 79, 80 “white genocide” rhetoric and, 64, 77–​78 white privilege and, 70, 72–​73, 75–​76 Williamson, Kevin, 184–​85 Williamson Jr., Chilton, 53–​54, 55 Winant, Howard, 67 Winfrey, Oprah, 29, 30t, 35t, 39t, 42 Winter, Tom, 32 Witness (Chambers), 158–​59 Women’s Leadership Forum (television program), 91t, 93 Women’s March, 99 Workman, William, 220–​21 World War II, 20 WRAL-​T V (Raleigh-​based television station), 124–​25,  137 Wu, Brianna, 79–​80   Yankee Network Inc., 113–​14 Yokam, Dwight, 54 Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), 123, 125, 126, 159–​60,  242–​43 YouTube, 86–​87, 137   Zenger case, 115–​16